


Life in Plastic

by Swagreus (shiplizard)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: 'What if Jack Morrison is fucking done with playing the straight man' an essay by me, Amnesia, Brainwashing, Cause he's like the real thing but cheaper, Drag, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Jack's drag name is Barbie Knockov, Non-Linear Narrative, Pretentious, Queer Families, Queer Themes, Second Chances
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2019-06-24 14:24:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15632493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiplizard/pseuds/Swagreus
Summary: In Oasis, Talon is scrambling to find their half-brainwashed captive.In a resort town south of Dorado, the local queer community adopts an old homeless man who reaches out to help one of their own.In the privacy of his own head, Jack Morrison questions all of his life choices.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bluandorange](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluandorange/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Our Heads Are Just Houses](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14323830) by [robocryptid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/robocryptid/pseuds/robocryptid). 



> Inspired shamelessly by 'Our Heads are just Houses' by robocryptid. There's more to this story, definitely, but I don't know if I'll get it written--for now, this stands alone. 
> 
> Content warnings: Violence (human and omnic), slurs being thrown around (by the bad guys and in a reclamatory sense by the community), brainwashing, medical abuse squick

He’s in the middle of the crowd when he hears it-- angry voices, the thump of wood on metal.

Nobody around him seems to hear it, but he's getting used to that. His hearing's very good these days, which doesn't quite make up for needing old- man glasses to read, but maybe the hearing's more useful.

Or maybe the people around him do hear it, and just aren't paying attention. Manzanillo's still more a resort town than anything -- pleasantness is in the brand. Unpleasantness is bad for business.

He tugs his ballcap down and slides out of the crowd, into the side streets, walking as fast as a man in thong sandals effectively can. The sounds haven't escalated yet, but somehow he knows they will. Somehow he knows a lot of things.

There's a fresh graffiti mark on the wall, a shabby, hastily- stenciled skull with no jaw. His adrenal glands pick up and take notice ; he doesn't recognize the symbol, but there's a lot he doesn't recognize. His emotions recognize it-- the constant cold apathy he's been struggling against lights up like kindling and burns with sudden fury. It’s wrong and it shouldn’t be this far south of Dorado.

He files this new certainty away.

There's the sound of metal crunching, a loud creak and a modulated static-hiss of pain.

"Take a swing, Omni-cunt!" a voice jeers. He’s close, now, the alterction is around that corner if it doesn’t dead end like some of these back alleys do.

"Take a swing, you know what will happen! Eh? Eh?"

He rounds the corner, laying the floppy soles of his sandals down with instinctive quiet, and sees... exactly what some well - hidden part of him expected to see. It feels like a confirmation, not new information.

Six humans, ringing one omnic. He should be frightened of that-- part of him is, with a lurch, but then it isn't. His brain tells him that the omnic crisis is still raging; his emotions tell him that the machine backed up against the wall in a defensive stance is no threat to him. The six shitheads, wielding baseball bats and tattooed with luminescent ink that makes them look like halloween skeletons in the gloomy alley -- they belong to the mark on the wall, his backbrain tells him-- they aren't a threat either. But they are assholes, and they make his gut seethe with a higher grade of hatred than his general base level of misanthropy.

The omnic was a tactical swarm model, once, before some homegrown modifications; its chassis's been anodized pink, and the studs ringing its neck and wrist definitely didn't come with the original package. A few are missing, the uneven color of the solder where they were applied telling him they weren't applied professionally. Maybe by the omnic itself, maybe by a friend? A pattern of rhinestones also hand- soldered onto the also-modified faceplate, making a butterfly around its glowing green visual ports. Two horizontal ports, a deliberately human eye setup, instead of the spider-cluster of sensors it would have come out of the omnium with.

The symmetry of the butterfly pattern has been destroyed by a well- placed swing of one of those bats. The casing is dented inward, the right visual port flickering with intermittent power.

"Fuck off back to Dorado," it says, regally unmoved despite the static creeping in between syllables. It has a whiskey-throat contralto, suggesting sexuality but not a sex. "You don't impress anyone here, Dead-beats."

"Oh, we will. The Dead has big plans for expansion," says the largest of the humans, hanging back as his cronies poke and taunt. "And when they find your body, everyone will know we're in town."

The Dead. _Los Muertos_. The name hits a dissonant chord.

One of his goons feints with a bat, giggling high- pitched when the omnic's arm jerks sideways to block her hit.

"Or you could try to take us ... and start a riot when we tell them that a filthy omnic laid hands on some good local kids. Just attacked without provocation."

"Pardon me, folks" he drawls, letting his native Midwestern accent mangle the spanish into something bland and stilted. They whirl on him, and the angry, hateful coal in his gut crackles orange, fanned by their surprise and anger.

"Quick question. Say you got dropped by a poor old combat veteran having a terrible flashback?" he says, indicating himself. "Over/under on a riot then? How do you think your buddies back in Dorado would think of you then?"

"Go back to your resort, tourist," the leader snaps, raising his own bat. He can see the butt of a pistol jammed into the leader’s waistband when his jacket shifts.

"Leave," the omnic snaps. "Help's coming. I don't need you being a hero."

"I just want a chat with these ... good... local... kids. I'm a lost American tourist," he sneers, strolling forward, the slap slap of his sandals a deliberate slap in the face of the gang members' dignity. "And I need help."

"Lost American tourists get mugged," the ringleader says coldly. "Everyone will say you shouldn't have left the main streets."

"Seriously, don't do this," the omnic says.

One of the other gang members-- not the giggly younger woman, but a scrawny late- twenties man missing teeth-- takes advantage of his distraction, takes a swing that the omnic catches on its wrist. Another of its studs snaps off, pings against the ground.

He should be able to defuse this. Just keep them talking until help comes, if it's coming, or at least confuse them until the omnic can make a break for safer pastures. But his gut doesn't want to defuse. His gut rebels at the thought. He's full of bile and spite and he wants to _hurt_ these fuckers in a way that scares him.

He thinks of the sound it made when his cousin Meg fell off her old draft horse, the dry-branch sound of her femur snapping. The sound marries together with the snarling face in front of him and instead of making him sick like it used to it fills him with anticipation.

 _Don't do it_ , he tells himself. _Because you'll get away with it. Because if these little shits go to jail it won't be because they're gang members, it'll be because they hit a respectable-looking old white man. Don't do it_.

 _Loosen up the posture. You know how you_ _look. Loosen it up. They know what will happen too, use it, don't abuse it._

He loosens himself up, puts on a smile he practiced in front of a cash register and perfected in the army. "Come on. Hit the road. The cops here aren't scared of you like they are back home; just cut your losses and go."

Then his arm moves without his permission; by the time he registers the shithead swinging he's already got the head of the bat in his left hand and the gang- member’s gun in his right. He jams it into the man's ribs; his thumb slides across the safety, finds it off, and he resettles his finger over the trigger guard. Over the trigger guard, like he was damn well trained to do, like he drilled to do, like he forged his instincts to do, not already on the trigger and applying pressure like the hate in his belly tells him to.

"I'm not scared of you," the man says, leaning into the barrel of the gun. "You don't have it in you."

Oh, but he does. He really, really does. He's aching to pull the trigger. He realizes his finger has drifted to it, the metal already warm to the touch. He could just do the kneecaps-- the asshole would need advanced prosthetics to ever walk again, but he'd probably live...

He freezes, horrified at his own thoughts, at his instincts, at how completely at home he feels one squeeze away from murder.

He’s never killed another human being that he remembers, but there’s a sick familiarity here, and he swears he knows how it would sound, the smell of it…

Noise jars his brain out of its sick spiral. There are footsteps coming. Dozens. The solid thump of boots; the stacatto click of hard soles, of high-heels, all together, not quite in unison but too close to be a casual gathering. The omnic was right; help is coming.

He keeps his eyes locked on the ringleader, and relaxes. Keeps the barrel against his ribs, keeps his white- knuckle grip on the baseball bat, but pulls his finger back out over the trigger guard. Like he was trained.

"Ball-less tourist," the ringleader sneers, and suddenly he’s holding the bat alone and the ringleader’s drawing back his arm. His body braces for the punch, but it's still a shock when the asshole's knuckles slam into his face-- his instincts were expecting something to be there, something to blunt the blow.

It's a clumsy hit, stinging, not enough weight behind it to budge him.

He feels blood trickling down his upper lip. His face is twisted into a sneer. It feels unfamiliar and familiar, like the hate in his guts, like the instincts that've been driving him.

The ringleader comes in for another swing, and he lamps the bastard across the temple with his left hand, holding the head of the bat like a can of soup and just bludgeoning him with the wooden side of it. The ringleader crumples at his feet.

He feels himself unraveling, fear crawling up his spine, not at the gang, not at the omnic, but at himself. All he has is the instincts and the instincts are cold and cruel and vicious and every time he draws a line he finds himself on the other side as if he wasn't even trying to hold himself back.

A shotgun cocks, the sound hitting his memory like a ball peen hammer hits a car window -- fury and hope and safety and fear all in that single sound -- and he looks up.

They're surrounded, him and Los Muertos. The gang members are shying back, alarmed at being suddenly outnumbered. He tears his gaze away when it tries to slide back to the body at his feet— re- assesses the situation, the reinforcements now at hand.

The woman with the shotgun is hispanic, older than-- ( no, not older than him ) -- in her late thirties. Her hair's in a tight fade that starts above her ear, skin shading up to short, tight curls only peppered with a little gray. In deference to the sweltering heat, her leather vest is unzipped to the bottom ; it hangs open over a white cotton camisole almost transparent with age. No bra. No fucks given. Fluevog angel boots, and damn her luck because, those things cost an arm and a leg and they look vintage.

Around her, almost as neatly arrayed as a scout party, another thirteen figures in a variety of shapes and sizes— humans in workaday clothes, or leather, or drag. Omnics, modified, one of them in drag too. Some of the crowd have bats themselves. Some of them have tasers. None of them look frightened of a few Los Muertos goons.

The tension in his gut uncoils, something deeper than his brutal, incomprehensible instincts taking the wheel.

Family's here.

He's safe.

The bat clatters from his hand, one of a loud chorus as the woman sweeps her shotgun across the ranks of Los Muertos and they drop their weapons too— out of fear and not relief, but it’s all the same rattle of wood on concrete.

He lets the hand holding the leader’s gun fall to his side. He hits the magazine release without looking and lets the magazine clatter to the ground to the ground, ejects the round in the chamber, and hits the slide release to let spring and slide both go free, bouncing in different directions. This is a muscle memory he remembers, this is muscle memory he was there for, he practiced this, he remembers practicing this.

"Took you long enough," says the pink omnic, arms still up even as the Los Muertos goons back off. "Vibrator finally run out of, out of, out of batteries, Leez'?"

"Sorry, Pearl. Had a fire alarm go off just before we got your SOS." Woman-with-shotgun smiles grimly, winks. "You know you're the only machine I'll ever love."

"You say that to zz-- tt." Omnics don't flinch, but he sees the pink shoulder hitch, involuntary and mechanical. "Fffzz." Even cut into static, the profanity is universal. "Fffffffu, fu, fuckers shorted my voice," it finally gets out, all furious surprise.

"Which ones?"

Pearl raises one hand.

There's a nasty dent on the shoulder casing, too, and its fingers have a slight splay- out- pull- in tic, but it indicates toothless, giggler, and one other gang member steadily enough.

Woman-with-shotgun looks at them coldly, taking in their faces one by one. "What about whitebread?"

"He wascxxx fffuck." Pearl's voice demodulates into something mechanical and inflectionless out of frustration. "Tried-to-help. Combat-veteran. Joked-about-flashback.Might-actually-be-having-flashback. Tash-please-fix-me-I-sound-like-a-toaster."

One of the humans, lean and androgynous and deliberately riding the line between masculine twink and small butch, breaks out of formation to head over to the ominc. They pull out a multitool and start to carefully examine the damage to the omnic's faceplate.

"...so, you played good samaritan with your fists?" the woman asks.

"Something like that," hesays, raising his empty hands. "I'm sorry. It-- she? They? told me to leave. I shouldn't have-"

The body at his feet is very, very still. There's no sweet-talking that one. No heroism in this. His head is swimming, acid flooding in his stomach. He was already sweating, but now he’s drenched.

“Buddy, are you all right?”

He shakes his head shortly.

"Okay. Stay put."

Los Muertos have all clustered into a group, muttering. One of them spits _dyke bitch_ , but not loud enough to get anyone’s attention. Spineless wonders.

Woman-with-gun squares her shoulders, shotgun at her hip, and nods at some of them.  "You, you, and you, separate."

The two goons that the omnic didn't point at evaporate away from their compatriots, leaving them standing high and dry.

"Tag them, Daisy."

"Don't touch us!" giggler snarls, as one of the larger queens breaks toward them.

"Nobody's going to hurt you," woman- with- gun says mercilessly. "This is just for our own information. So wherever you go in this town, everyone will know what species of asshole you are. Like scientists do with birds"

"Don't be a baby," the queen says, popping the cap off a little tube, extracting a dripping brush. "It comes off with makeup remover. Or in a few days, if you don't have any on hand." She draws a swift X on the giggler's forehead before she can flinch away. The other two hang back; she curls her manicured finger. Woman-with-gun points lifts said gun a little higher.

The two goons come forward with their heads hanging and impotent fury in the set of their shoulders to be marked, a rich wine- red with pink undertones, color as saturated as a cut ruby.

"Are you really wasting Marc Jacobs on these punks?" he asks, horror cutting the nausea.

The queen looks briefly surprised. "No, sweetie, no. This is the BB knockoff stain. It feathers something brutal, but it sticks."

"Okay. Okay, you had me worried."

"It's still too good for trash like this." The smoky eyes turn sharp and cold. The drag queen leans down to the sweating gang members. "Don't let us see you in this neighborhood again."

Woman-with-gun gestures-with-gun. Toothless and an unmarked gang member grab their leader's body, and they drag him off at speed.

And it's over.

He feels the last of the adrenaline drain, leaving him shaky. The coal of rage has burned town to toxic, stinking ash, and he needs to sit down soon.

"Hey-sugar, tell-me-you-were-defending-my-chassis-work-not-my-honor-and-I-might-forgive-you."

The pink omnic comes strolling over; its face looks better, the tic in its hands is stilled, but its voice is still vocoded.

He finds a wink and a smile through the haze of nausea. "I try never to lie to beautiful people."

"Typical-gendered-human-chauvinist."

The omnic's head-toss makes it a joke when its inflection can't. "By-the-way. Usually-‘It’. But-‘he/him’-right-now. Until-I-get-my-voice-fixed."

"Sorry about that."

"It's-okay-humans-aren't-observant."

The right optic sensor flicks black then green in a wink.

"I'm-Pearl-with-no-A. What's-your-designation-big-boy?"

"Ken," he says, the first lie he's told this afternoon. He likes to keep count while he can.

"Like-the-doll?"

"Barbie's best friend."

"Don’t-pull-that-again.”

"Yessir."

“But-thanks.”

“You’re very welcome.”

"Where are you staying?" asks androgynous Tash. "Let us walk you home in case those shitheads are still in the city."

"No, that's-- that's okay."

"Not an offer, whitebread." Woman-with-gun has lowered the gun, holding it against her leg. She extends a hand. "Nice to meet you, Ken. I'm Elisa. I'm not letting you walk home alone, you giant fucking hypocrite. Just tell me what resort you're in. We're heading to Hotelville anyway, the best repair shop is right outside."

"I'm not in the resort district." One lie so far. He doesn't want another. They get so heavy. "Other way."

"Up-North?"

"Yeah. About, uh, twenty minutes up the old I - 200."

"There's no hotels up there," Elisa says, giving him an unimpressed look.

One lie so far today. He keeps his mouth shut over another.

“…there’s the vacant shipping yard, but most people are too smart to camp there. It’s dangerous.”

He shrugs.

"What-the-fuck, Ken-doll."

“These clothes are stolen. I don’t have any cash.”

"Saint Mary."

Elisa's eyes shadow. "How long?"

"A few months."

"What happened a few months ago?"

Silence. One lie so far.

"Okay." Elisa nods. She's taking it in stride, must have dealt with people who weren't completely together before. The community is sanctuary for people like him. And still the hateful misanthropy in him, which responds to random people with loathing and responds to the sound of a shotgun with a complete emotional shutdown -- it tells him there is no sanctuary. Not for him. That he doesn't deserve it. That he can't have it.

And he's so lonely and so tired of hating everyone and living out of cargo containers and abandoned cars.

“Can’t find work?”

He shakes his head.

“How are you getting by?”

“Not well. Working off instinct.”

“Good instincts?”

“No.” They’re the instincts of an antisocial, rabid raccoon.

“You have flashbacks?” she asks kindly.

He nods. Lie number two. Flashbacks are the opposite of his problem, but it’s a simple explanation, it’ll do. It explains things he can’t explain otherwise.

“Do you get violent?”

“Mostly not,” he says quietly.

“’Mostly.’”

He looks at his feet where the gang leader fell, looks back up. Promises nothing.

"Okay, whitebread," Elisa says, as if a decision has been made. "We're not taking you back to a shipping container. You're coming with me back to Bianca's, and we're finding you somewhere to stay."

"I-have-an-air-mattress," Perl says

“You sure, Perl?”

“I’m-less-squishy-than-humans, Leez.”

“Are you going to be a problem?” Elisa addresses him.

He shakes his head hurriedly.

"All right. Good.

When'd you eat last?"

"Lunch. I’m good at grifting. Talked my way into a sales convention, raided the buffet." And got a few vacuum salesmen so guilty about 'forgetting' their old contact from another region that he was bought three separate rounds of drinks.

His body likes booze, prioritizes finding it above other things. He's always had an addictive personality, he's got to watch that.

His new friend surround him, protective, and guide him through the streets -- past a bar labeled Bianca's, faded rainbow flag flying, where about half the party peels off-- employees and patrons, back on shift now that the danger is past. Mix of humans and omnics chatting outside, easier with each other than in other quarters of the city. Night and day from Dorado, just an hour up the coast.

He’s not sure how he knows that. He doesn’t remember visiting Dorado.

There's an artist already at work painting over the Los Muertos tag, a teenager double- fisting aerosol cans and making gorgeous flowers bloom over the skull.

Perl shows him up to his apartment— a shoebox studio, full of more plants than living space. There’s a shoulders- up charge cradle in the kitchen, no bed, but Perl’s couch is worn in the shape of sleeping bodies, and there's old second- hand odds and ends everywhere as if human guests are a regular occurrence.

"See-you-when-I-get-back-from-the-repair-shop.

I'll-grab-groceries. Allergies?"

"...I can conclusively say no." He and his body have very different ideas of what constitutes ‘ edible’. More than once, hunger has driven him to find out how far that divide goes. There's things he doesn't want to remember eating. Doesn't want to think about how it didn't even feel like the first time.

"Make-yourself-at-home. Air-mattress-in-the-closet. It's-a-manual-pump. Fridge-is-fair-game. Don't-unsort-my-albums."

"Everything will go back exactly where it came from."

"Good-boy."

He’s nervous. He feels penned in. He wants to run, bolt back to the sweltering shipping container. He sits down on the couch instead.

"It'll be a while before I can pay you back."

"Nah-don't-worry. Leez-will-find-you-something."

"Thank you." He says it with the emotion he should feel, not the emotion he does feel. His guts are still full of ash and hate. He feels safer than he's felt for a very long time, and that's still not safe. He feels happier than he's felt in months and that's barely happy at all.

“Feel-free-to-use-the-shower. There’s-soap.”

A shower. A real shower, not a sponge bath up to his knees in salt water or surreptitiously at the spigots by the public beaches. A shower where he can take off all his clothes at once and wash.

“ _Thank_ you.” No need to feign the emotion this time.

“Happy-to-help. See-you-soon.”

He’s already on his feet when the door shuts behind Perl, making an unsteady lurch for the shower, nausea and disorientation and all. He sheds his old white man drag on the way, wanting hot water on his skin as fast as humanly possible, not bothering to fold his things. …that should be an almost involuntary habit, but it’s not.

He shuts off the thought by turning on the water as hot as it goes and stepping into it, the first lukewarm splash heating up quickly.  He looks around for the promised soap—finds a graveyard of half  empty and nearly empty bottles, shampoo, conditioner, lotion, shower gel, the remnants of other guests waiting to be helpful.

He grabs a 2-in-1 that’s almost empty, unscrewing the cap to half-fill it with water. He shakes it hard, then upends the soapy mess into his hair and lets it sink into the limp strands. Rinse; do it again. He can’t remember the last time he felt this clean.

He stays in the shower until the water runs tepid, as cold as the tap gets in this heat. He can't keep scrubbing, he's going to irritate his skin, but the impulse to scrape until all the filth is gone is a strong one.

The rabid raccoon in his brain is uncertain, doesn't trust the way the water shuts out the background noise, doesn't like standing naked without a weapon nearby. It's not a driving fear, though.

He's going to enjoy this just to spite himself.

He towels off with a faded, stained towel-- blood, makeup, no grease, no working fluid.  He imagines an invisible tag designating it 'safe for human use'.  When he's mostly dry, he tosses it over the shower rod to dry, stands naked in front of the mirror and lets his skin breathe.

The raccoon stirs and prickles. The last time he was this naked it was the hospital gown. The last time he was this naked, there was Doctor Macallister.

He focuses on the tile grout, squints to read individual labels from the magpie nest of half-used bottles, presses his senses up against everything that's not a sterile bed, an institutional label.  He gives his face a short scrub with a mascara-stained washcloth, picks a random bottle of moisturizer and rubs it in gentle circles into his battered skin. It smells like baked goods, vanilla and cinnamon, the kind of frou-frou shit he hasn't had access to since before he enlisted. He closes his eyes and inhales deep, grounds himself in it.

He's gaining ground over the rabid raccoon now. There's almost-contentment at his fingertips. He can almost accept the face in the mirror as his.

Out in the apartment, the door slams; metal-on-tile footsteps, the sound of cans in a bag hitting a countertop.

He puts on his old-man shorts and steps out into the main room of the little studio, sees Perl eyeing a can and then swiveling his head to eye the cupboard thoughtfully.

"Can I help with that?"

Perl looks over. His faceplate is back in shape. The rhinestone pattern is still asymmetrical, but there's been damage control-- it looks artistic, not damaged, and so does the slight rainbow discoloration of the metal, pink doing a sharp gradient to gold where an electrical welder came into play.

He tries to relax as Perl looks up and down, the movement of his head entirely for show, and synthesizes a whistle.  "Well, you clean up well for a human your ay." and then the sound just stops.

In the next second he remembers that Perl's pronouns change when its voice synthesizer is working; he remembers he doesn't have his ball cap to shadow his face; he realizes all the plants in the kitchen are epiphytic; he realizes that Perl has cut off short and is staring at him. Not all of those details are connected, but his brain is casting around for anything.

Perl’s shoulders swivel to face him, face not moving at all even as its entire posture changes. Like chickens on the farm, head fixed in space for better visual acuity no matter what else moves.

"Holy shit, you're Jack Morrison."

His entire body goes cold.

"Don't," he says, not knowing what he’s asking for.  

The raccoon bears its foaming teeth. He's been compromised, he needs to move now, he needs to shut the witnesses up at any cost--

He realizes he knows where Perl's critical power connectors are, and how to reach them. He can almost feel conduit and circuitry under his fingers. His hands make claws.

 _NO!_ he screams at himself.

Perl takes a step back, hits the refrigerator with a clatter.

"If you kill me after I brought you groceries, I'm going to be so pissed," it says, nonchalant but fuzzing with voltage overload at the edge of its range.

"I'm not -- I'm not, I'm sorry." He clasps his hands in front of him, digs the ragged nails of one into the back of the other. He ignores the raccoon clawing and scrabbling inside his brain. "Please don't tell anyone."

"Oh. Kay. Okay?"

"I know it sounds like bullshit, but I think someone's after me."

"I bet."  A fuzz of white-noise like a cleared throat. "You know you're supposed to be dead, right?"

"I read that, yeah."

"...I mean, weren't you there, weren't you, weren't you, oh my god did the tabloids get it right? Was the bombing a false flag? Was your body double there because you had a lovechild with Amari-"

"I don't know!" he interjects to stem the tide. "I don’t know, I don't remember. I don't remember any of it."

"Any of what?"

"Zurich. Captain Amari.  'Overwatch.'"

"....you don't remember Overwatch." Perl's forearms cross its chest, a possibly unconscious defense mechanism. "What do you remember? What's the last thing you remember?"

Jack forces his shoulders down, clasps his hands tighter.

"I'm not going to hurt you."

"What year do you think it is?" Perl demands, voice fuzzing again.

"I know it's 2076. I've read the papers, I've read wikipedia, I know what year it is."

"You know that's not what I mean."

"I remember 2044," he says slowly, untwining his stiff hands so he can raise them, empty palms toward Perl, in a gesture of surrender. Its optic ports are going white-teal with the intensity of its stare. The raccoon knows he's been scanned in non-visible spectrums, wants to dive behind the couch.  He breathes calmly and holds position. "But I know it's over. I've been reading up, I know it's over."

"Why did you help me?" Perl sounds lost. Its eyes dim down to friendly yellow-green.

"My body knows things my brain doesn't." Deep breath. Defuse. No brutality this time. Not when he's a guest in its house, when it and its people have been good to him. "I'm not going to say I'm not scared of you. I am. But there's a part of me that knows you aren't a threat and the  shitheads with the tattoos... well, they weren't too much of a threat either, but they were shitheads."

"Los Muertos? Why would Overwatch know about-- no, I'm sorry, that's a stupid question right now."

"Part of me knows the name. Their tag. I've tangled with them before. I just... don't remember." he adds, quieter.  "I hated them on first sight and I have no idea why. There's a lot of that these days."

"That's awful." Perl's arms slowly come down. "Are you okay?"

"No."  He laughs, a chuff of air across his palatte, through a rictus-grin of terrible humor. "I'm really not. At least the hallucinations stopped. I don’t know if I was followed here. I don’t think I was."

"We're going to take care of you," Perl says firmly. "If someone's after you, they aren't going to find you. No more cargo containers, Ken." The name is blanket-warm and heavy, draped across his raw fear.  "In this neighborhood we take care of our own."

He swallows hard.

"We're going to have to do something with your face,” Perl says, suddenly businesslike.  “The scars are new, but your facial structure's still an 89% match to the last pictures of you I saw.  Anyone else with advanced facial recognition's going to recognize you as fast as I did. We have to break your signature."  Perl lifts its hand to its chin and taps thoughtfully, a series of almost-musical metallic impacts. "How do you feel about eyeliner?"

"Like it's a good start."  Jack's mouth curls up at one side. That, of everything he could be asked to endure, is easy.  "Give me twenty dollars and ten minutes in a drug store, I can get something together. I'm out of practice, but I know how to change this face."

"...Strike Commander Morrison knows how to contour?"

"I don't know about Strike Commander Morrison, but Jack Morrison used to bake his face on the forty-five minute commute into Bloomington and he could get into full drag in the passenger seat of a standard-cab pickup."

Perl's fingertips still, curl artistically against its faceplate. Mouthless and with unblinking optical ports, it does an excellent impression of a jaw-dropped stare. "That's not in the wikipedia article."

"There's a lot that isn't."

It's telling, all the things that weren't in there.

The army was a duty, not a calling. He promised himself that, when the crisis was over and his duty was done, he was going back to to the clubs, back to the life, and if he couldn't make it in professional drag he'd find something to keep him in proximity to it, to life and vibrance. He promised himself that.  Now he finds himself in the body of an old man with a face like untreated leather, with hands that know the shape of more guns than he can remember holding in his life but feel clumsy around a concealer brush. Somewhere along the line he let those hopes go. Somewhere along the line he broke his promises.

He's seen the pictures. Him, between the time he remembers and the date he was supposed to have died. He’s seen himself in a big non-standard uniform coat, appropriately dramatic, and always smiling his friendly smile, his customer-service smile, reasonable and likeable and his actual mind six steps back behind his eyes feeling out the angles. In the serious pictures he's news-anchor serious, always studiously appropriate. He knows his own front when he sees it. He can't tell what's happening behind that Jack's eyes.

He can imagine a series of events that would turn him into that guy; slowly, year after year and little decision after little decision, like that sadistic old adage about boiling a frog. He's only human, he's no more special than anyone else who grew up and disappointed themselves.

He can empathize with this between-Jack who lived through the empty patch in his head.

He's just horrified by him.

Is there anyone alive who knows who Jack Morrison actually was? Did he even know who he was, at the end?

There's a rabid raccoon in his mind that thinks dumpsters are a safe place to sleep and humanity isn't worth the benefit of the doubt. The only emotions he can feel clearly anymore are resignation, grief, fear, and rage. He knows how to hurt people and he wants to. His face feels naked without something covering it, he feels vulnerable stepping outside without kevlar between him and the world.

What has he made himself?

God, what has he done?

"Ken," Perl says softly, and he realizes that he's crumpled in on himself as he stands. He’s hyperventilating. "Ken, it's going to be okay. You're with family now.  We'll take care of you."

\---

_This is how it starts:_

_Jack Morrison is 25 years old, and he has just gone through one of the most painful experiences in his life.  The round-3 shots of the SEP left him screaming out loud-- so far past dignity he couldn't even see it in the rear view, the raw pain in his throat a welcome relief compared to what was happening in his skull and in his bones._

_Jack Morrison wakes up in a med-bay he doesn't recognized, surrounded by medical personnel he doesn't know._

_"Easy," says the doctor leaning over. She has a soft irish lilt; her ID badge says MacAllister, but that seems...wrong, somehow. Incorrect. Untrue. "Easy, my lad, you're through the worst of it now."_

_"What happened? Is everyone else okay? Molly Lawson, Gabe Reyes, Arthur Wallace, did they make it-?"_

_"They're just fine. Doing better than you, I'm afraid," she says sadly, and it seems insincere to Jack, but that has to be the lingering pain talking, making him spiteful. "We're afraid you might have suffered some brain damage. We'll be keeping you in this facility until we can make sure you're well enough to go back. How's your head? We've a few memory exercises we need to run through, but it can wait a little while if you need."_

_"No, doc, I'm good to go." Paste on the 'good little recruit' face, the midwestern good ol' boy; if he fakes not being terrified and miserable enough to cry, maybe he won't be._

_The 'memory tests' start off unremarkably-- locker combination, last few presidents, a few flash-cards for recall-- but then things start to go weird. They start slipping in more pressing questions.  Personal ones.  They start asking about the shots he's been given, fishing for details._

_At first he thinks it's some kind of sick loyalty test; maybe they're checking to make sure he actually read those draconian NDAs he signed._

_Then... he starts to realize it isn't. Every time he fails to answer, or answers too vaguely, he sees Doctor MacAllister's eyes go a little colder, her mouth a little tighter._

_They do that for about five days._

_On the fifth day, no memory tests. The doctor tells him his vitals are poor and they’ll be putting him on fluids; she gets an IV up his arm, a catheter up his dick, and then she injects him with something that completely disconnects his muscles from his brain._

_Her face twists into a terrible smirk as she leans over his paralyzed body, and something in Jack's brain goes: yes. That's normal. That's the expected response._

_"Aren't you the good little soldier?" she croons poisonously. "Well. We'll soon change that."_

_Then she fixes something over his slack face, and video springs to life in panorama. He feels something cold and tacky affixed to his arm, another something a few inches away, but his arm feels like it belongs to someone else, so disconnected to what he’s seeing._

_It takes ten minutes and five electric shocks to realize... this is conditioning._

_It's absurd. Whoever these creeps are, they're brainwashing him.  Video, prompt, response, shock. He ... he never actually thought about brainwashing but he didn't expect to be lucid for it. Video, prompt, response, shock._

_His dad taught him to beat a polygraph when he was twelve.  Garbage science, he told Jack firmly, but it might someday be used against him by people with bad intent. He had to be ready._

_They aren't polygraphing him, he knows that, the shocks would mess with it-- he guesses it's pupil response.  That's a hell of a lot harder to fake._

_The shocks are a good teacher._

_He busies himself with remembering the prompts, and his expected response, he turns it into homework, he memorizes the rules being laid out and wonders deep inside if this is how it gets you, if he's actually just digging the conditioning deeper in. It doesn't FEEL like it. He recites poetry, he goes through the list of every actor in the new Star Trek reboot, in credits order, he makes up nonsense poems and lets them fall away, because the alternative is shocks, and the alternative to the shocks is worse-- the crushing exhausting boredom of this stream of images and commands, like someone's shitty po-mo video art thesis._

_They show him his own face a lot. They show him the date. This is him, it prompts him, and he doesn't have to fake the response. Of course it is.  This is now, it shows him, and of course that's now. Why are they repeating this over and over?_

_A seed of fear takes root somewhere in him._

_Then:_

_"Good morning," Doctor Macallister croons, when he comes groggy out of the shelter of his own head. "Feeling better, love?"_

_He almost recoils from the word, it's so fundamentally incorrect on her tongue. But he instantly remembers the command, the long cycle of repetition that ‘this is Doctor Macallister, you can trust Doctor Macallister with anything’ so he gives his most winning farmboy grin and says:_

_"I sort of feel like I got hit by a tractor, actually. Can I have some water?"_

_"Of course, of course," she soothes.  "And we'll need to run those memory tests again."_

_Is this being brainwashed? Does he only think he's choosing to do what he's told? Does he actually have any control over himself?_

_But he remembers, he remembers her cruel smile, he remembers being shocked whenever he acknowledged the image of keypad on the wall, the soldiers in black uniforms and helmets. He pretends not to see them around his bed, but they're right goddamn there and it feels like the universe is playing one hell of a practical joke on him._

_"Doc... can I get this catheter out for just a while?" he tests the waters. "I'd like to piss under my own steam just once."_

_She doesn't hide her irritation, her sneer. The audio command to trust her replays, without conviction; a memory without its hooks in him.  Video, prompt, stimulus. He forces himself not to react, to go on smiling like she's the nicest person around, by gosh._

_"Oh, fine. It'll be an interesting test, at least."_

_She tosses his medical gown open with disinterest, pulls out the catheter with a jerk just shy of doing actual damage, and croons 'Oh, poor lad' when he cringes around his abused dick._

_"Sorry, Doc, I must have flinched."_

_"I know," she purrs, looking delighted. Crazy creepshow likes thinking he's taking the blame for her sadism, and that bodes very, very poorly for the future. "You can't help it."_

_He pretends not to see the soldiers in black as they flank him on the way to the bathroom. He does not acknowledge the keypad. He pretends nothing is wrong._

_And then the seed of fear blooms, as he lifts his eyes to the mirror, and knows why they spent so long showing him video of his own damn face._

_Jack Morrison is twenty-five._

_His hair is bone white and receding up his scalp; his lip is torn open with an old scar, another bisecting his face on the diagonal from forehead to cheekbone. His skin is cracked, wrinkled, worn, uncared for._

_Jack Morrison is twenty-five._

_He has at least sixty more pounds of muscle on him than he remembers having. His knuckles are gnarled, bent out of shape, a mess of white scar tissue._

_His eyes are cloudier and still horribly recognizable. It's all him. The bone structure, that's him. It's his face. But it isn't. It's the body he's in but it's not his body. He wants to tear open his own skin. This isn't him. This isn't him!_

_He can't stop himself from recoiling, can't stop his hands from shaking, wracked with waves of wrongness and repulsion at the him unhim in the mirror, and something stings his shoulder. The soldiers in black catch him as his muscles give out. He can feel piss dribbling from his dick as even his bladder surrenders to the muscle relaxant._

_"I thought you might need another round or two, you old bastard," Doctor Macallister snarls. "Turn up the voltage just a wee bit, Jones."_

_Then:_

_He thinks it’s about five hours later.  Most of the video segments felt like five minutes, he counted seconds in his brain, and he counted the videos. He's pretty sure he single-counted some loops, though. He's trembling with the shocks, some of which came at random, with flashed images that were there and gone, not even waiting for a response, just a nose-smack NO assigned to random concepts he can't keep track of._

_Doctor Macallister looms over him, smiling like she's just had good sex._

_He hates her in a way he hasn't hated anyone since he was fifteen and stocking shelves in a small town halfway between the farm and Bloomington.  Most customers he could tolerate or get along with, but some of them came in with a look in their eye and he learned it. Some of them just wanted to scream at people who had to take it. Others felt entitled to a growing list of absurd accomodations for imagined slights, wanted the impossible done quickly. Some looked around with dismay and bee-lined for the one white employee visible, muttering suspicions to him under their breaths, imagining Tod following them or Lotty eyeing their purse, happy in the assumption that Jack must share their bullshit worldview, of course, and Jack soaked it up for his friends because they all covered for each other but he wanted to knock in some teeth most days._

_He was fifteen and he found himself hating people in a way he’d never felt before or since, not even in the army. Until now._

_He hates Doctor Macallister.  The feeling comes surprisingly easily, flows along well-worn grooves in him that he doesn't recognize. There's a resistance to pain that comes along with it, an ability to shut down he doesn't remember learning that’s always with him now._

_"Good morning," Doctor Macallister says, like she hasn’t been torturing him for maybe twelve solid hours. "How are you feeling, my poor boy?"_

_He puts on the farmboy smile. It’s always come easier when he was feeling spiteful; it’s very easy now._

_"I sort of feel like I got hit by a tractor, actually. Can I have some water?"_

_“In a minute, dearie. Can you take a look at this for me?”_

_She passes him a mirror._

_He’s ready this time.  He blinks at it, squints.  “My vision’s a little blurry, doc, I didn’t hit my head while I was down, did I?”_

_“Oh, I’m afraid you did. You’re clumsier than I’d expect,” she laughs._

_“What do you see?”_

_He chuckles. “A recruit desperately in need of a haircut? That haystack has to be violating some uniform regs.”_

_“Oh, don’t you worry about that. It’ll be a while before you’re back in uniform,” she gloats._

_She scores her fingernails into his scalp in a mockery of a caress._

_He smiles.  He hates._

_He begins to plan_.

_\---_

Jack Morrison is 25 going on 58. He doesn’t have a name for the organization he’s running from. His life is a blank board and most of the puzzle pieces he’s been offered don’t fit.

His parents are dead, something he still hasn’t internalized-- it comes sudden and shocking at odd hours, then fades into old pain. His friends have become people he doesn’t recognize. Most of his army buddies are dead.

One of his army buddies may have dropped a building on him. Depends on which source you ask.

He has no place, but in the queer district of Manzanillo they make a place for him. He slides into it, grateful for the borrowed clothes and loaned cash and flow of affection and friendly contact.

Elisa finds him a job dishwashing at a local restaurant-- hard work, but the hot water feels good on his arthritic knuckles and he doesn’t have to sift for food in the trash he hauls out to the dumpster, so all things considered, a bonus. He does shifts bouncing and ushering at Bianca’s on the weekend. He keeps busy, saves enough to rent a shitty apartment somehow even smaller than Perl’s under the name Kenneth Dahl. He regrets that almost immediately, but it doesn’t seem to draw the wrong kind of attention, and he relaxes. With Perl's help, he changes his face-- highlighter here, highlighter there, eyeshadow here, eyeliner there-- and wears the tackiest ballcaps he can get his hands on to further hide his face. He looks like mutton dressed as lamb, an old man pining for his glory days... but he doesn't look like Jack Morrison, so he'll take it.

He starts researching how to cover scars with stage makeup. He starts shopping for a blond wig on the cheap. He digs in himself and finds emotions that aren’t hate, grief, resignation, rage. He lives.

Then:

Jack Morrison walks into his apartment and grabs the bottle of hand cream he keeps by the door for dishwashing nights, and sees Death sitting in the tiny patch of real estate optimistically designated the ‘kitchen’.

His mind does the thing it does when he hears shotguns, tangles itself into a snarl of conflict, leaves him with the horrible sensation of looking down from the top of a roller coaster and seeing broken tracks in front of him. The raccoon wakes up from hibernation, sniffing warily at this specter.

He thought he was done with the hallucinations.

“Hello, Jackie,” says Death. “Took a while to find you.”

“Whatever. I have work tomorrow,” he sighs, and walks right past the figment of his broken mind, grabs one of the frozen water bottles from the freezer and clasps it against his neck.

Death is gone when he turns around, nothing at his tiny dinner table but a wisp of smoke.

There’s a dealer at the bar that can get him some antipsychotics.  He’ll be fine, he’ll have his friends watch him to make sure he doesn’t check out of his head and do something he doesn’t want to.  There’s too much he wants to do with his time to slow down for something as everyday as a broken brain.

Jack Morrison is 25 going on 58, and he embraces his life with open, aged arms.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack:  
> -Confronts what is obviously a hallucination  
> -Has a mild breakdown  
> -Remembers more time as a captive  
> -Institutes an emergency friend date

Jack comes awake with a start. The feral raccoon that lives in his head scrabbles behind his eyes, chewing up the insulation restlessly.

There's a shotgun pointing at his face. He breathes in through his nose and he can smell... iron. Old gunpowder. Brimstone.

Part of him-- the conscious part, the himself part-- has the expected reaction, the tensing, the adrenaline surging into his veins, but in a strange reversal, the raccoon is almost calm. It's part of his subconscious too; it must know the gun and the specter holding it aren't real.

"It's three fucking AM," he tells the dark shape looming over him, and rolls over. The threat remains behind him, the utter certainty that he's not alone is still with him.

"I'm sorry, Jackie. Bad time?" Death rasps, deadpan.

"Is it ever a good one?"

"I'm hurt."

"I doubt it."

"I can remove that doubt." Metal prods against his back; the barrel of the gun feels completely real, but too warm even in the heat. "It would be so easy. Settle the old scores. A name off the list."

"I've heard this one before."

Death threatens him a lot, and he'd think that was a manifestation of deep-buried suicidal urges, but... it isn't. Not like he's ever known them, anyway. He doesn't have the lazy desire to die without the urge to do anything about it that he went through as a teenager, when even breathing felt stifling and directionless misery was a constant cicada chorus over his thoughts; he doesn't feel the urgent sobbing need to stop existing that he associates with the round-one shots, where they had to be strapped down and sedated because being conscious of the inescapable constant fire in their joints came close to driving them all insane.

It's not like that. It doesn't feel like he wants to die.

Besides, the raccoon isn't afraid. The raccoon is diseased and hateful, but its urge to survive is second to none. If it doesn't think he's in danger, he probably isn't.

He's exhausted. The pills he's been taking-- in order to not hallucinate Death sitting at his bedside or hulking in his kitchen-- they sap his energy. The adrenaline has already faded and he just feels sick with the need for sleep. His thoughts are flickering in and out, his eyelids a thousand pounds.

He feels the unyielding metal suddenly yield, gunmetal into cotton candy. The pressure at his back is gone. He risks a look back over his shoulder, squinting his burning eyes. The shotgun is nowhere to be seen; the Death of Soldiers, clothèd all in shotgun shells, is standing with its arms crossed.

"Do you want something?"

"So many things, Jack."

He rolls his eyes, jams his pillow over his face.

It's ripped out of his grip; icewater goes through him, gives him another beat of wakefulness. He hates when Death touches things-- he hates knowing it's just him, acting without knowing it. Sometimes it moves things, or he thinks it moves things-- and he knows he must have done it himself, in an absent fugue. His pills and his keys won't stay where he left them. He finds empty bottles, too-- the raccoon is a drunk, and its need for alcohol crawls into his own mind as implacable as blackberry vines.

That scares him more than anything. Death and the Raccoon are cruel, violent, he doesn't want to see what they could do with this burly old body of his when he's not watching. It's why he jumped ship from Perl's apartment a solid two months before he really could afford to; better to go a few weeks without eating than risk something happening to his friend. Than risk _doing_ something to his friend.

Not that Elisa and the crew at Bianca's ever let him go without eating. They don't count the debts he owes them, but he does.

He will not let his body, his traumatized backbrain, be the tool that hurts these people.

He glares at Death as if defiance alone will keep his subconscious from betraying him.

Its claws spear into the pillow. "Where do you get off running from your past?"

"I've got a year over year rental contract on this place, how is that 'running?'"

Death scoffs.  "You know this life isn't for you, soldier. You don't deserve it."

On this, Death and the Raccoon are in complete agreement.

"I know."

"There's a name for people who take what they don't deserve."

"And you've called me worse. Get to your point or let me sleep." He'd throw a punch, but he knows it wouldn’t connect; there's not actually anything there to hit, just smoke and air. He learned that lesson the first time Death showed up at his elbow.

It isn't really there, he tells himself, but he hears it. Rasping breathing in the dark. The creaking sound of old leather moving. The hot air stirs as Death leans over him.

"Why are you giving up now?" The voice is nothing but the grate of a shovel against a tombstone. "What did Moira do to you that was so much worse than the rest of the shit we've been through?"

'Moira' is the woman he knows as Doctor Macallister, a breadcrumb his subconscious dropped for him a while ago. That's what Death seems to be for. The Raccoon feeds him impulses; Death feeds him names, details from his missing memories... and guilt, and insults, and threats. The human side of his trauma, maybe? He's no shrink, he couldn't say how he works.

"I don't know. I'm just... tired." His eyes sag shut. All he can think of anymore is getting more sleep. He'd do anything to get more sleep. That's why sleep deprivation is a form of torture, he reminds himself.

"...Jackie." A rattling breath, a nickname he’s never used. Ma’s the only person who ever called them that without raising his hackles, but Death apparently can do it too.

A soft weight lands by his head, and he stuffs the pillow gratefully back under him.

"Fuck off," he whispers, and it comes out plaintive. "Please, I'm so goddamn tired, fuck off."

Sharp claws ghost over his shoulder, and then he feels the sudden absence of the specter. He sinks into blissful unconsciousness, the details of the encounter already smoothing over in his memory.

\---

In the morning, he forgets it entirely. Until he sees the puncture marks in his pillow-- the case is shredded and the pillow itself is torn, bits of poly-fiber stuffing spilling out of it like viscera.

"Shit," he sighs, and goes for his sewing kit. After a second of thought, he takes his meds first before he repairs the pillow.

He does the math in his head; how much can he afford to give Della for more or better anti-psychotics? They're expensive because they're so rare, specially procured; there's no recreational value to them, nobody bothers running them on the black market.

But he tore up his own pillow last night and doesn't remember doing it; he's not risking that one day he wakes up and finds out that he's torn up something much more vital.

He stitches up the pillow, quick and ugly, but the lines of stitches are sturdy and not going to pull free. By the time he’s done, his stomach is growling for breakfast, twisting hard enough to remind him about that little ‘take with food’ label on the pill bottle that he keeps ignoring.

He ransacks his mini-fridge, finds some quickly turning vegetables and a couple dubious eggs. He misses fresh eggs dug out of the straw, the rich taste of them-- he’s thought wistfully of a few layers, but this isn’t the kind of hipster neighborhood where you can get away with a coop on the roof, and he doesn’t have the space otherwise.

The eggs don’t float in a cup of water yet, and he’s got a gut like iron anyway. He whisks them with salt and pepper, dices the vegetables, and dumps it all into a little ceramic microwave cooker-- a housewarming gift courtesy of his friend MJ. He’s got a microwave, a toaster oven, and a hotplate. He can still feed himself something more food-adjacent than the army did-- and a hot plate is a luxury after eating cold soup out of dented cans while he was on the run.

While his scramble rotates peacefully in the microwave, he rummages around until he finds his current pack of cigarettes-- halfway down, in just over a week. That’s not too bad, he thinks. Not that he knows. ...he never smoked anything but the occasional joint before the army, but god, he’d been hanging out behind Bianca’s one night while some of the queens smoked and it’d struck him like a lightning bolt. A cigarette feels at home between his lips the way weapons feel easy in his hands.

At least smoking redirects the urge to drink. He’ll tackle one addiction at a time, he’ll manage.

There’s a little cool left on the morning. He sets his cheap little fan in the window, and it squeaks every few rotations as it blows stagnant air and cigarette smoke out into the alley.

The microwave beeps at him; he grabs a plate from the dishrack, a fork from the sink. He serves himself breakfast with his cigarette clamped in his mouth, holds it one one hand as he hunches over his tiny breakfast table and shovels egg into his face.

When the plate’s scraped clean, he sets it in the sink and leans his hip against the counter. With his face to the window, he smokes the last of his cigarette.

He’s almost expecting it when he blows white smoke out the window, and black ash comes swirling in against the weak current of the fan, slides through the screen and over his shoulder.

“You know those things will kill you,” says a grating voice, a second later.

His lips curve up around the filter. “Back so soon?”

“It’s not three am anymore.”

“It isn’t. I appreciate that. Thank you for saving your death threats for daytime hours.”

There’s a laugh like a halloween store special effect.

Death is slouched over Jack’s table when he turns away from the window, sitting in the single chair with his chin balanced on one clawed hand.

“So polite, Jack. You’re still such a _boyscout,_ aren’t you?”

Jack lifts three fingers to his forehead in a salute, and then curls the outer two back. Death cackles again.

“Shame I have to kill you.”

“Shame I have to die.”

The white bone face tips to one side, considering him. “...you look younger when you smile.”

“Flatterer.” Jack stubs his cigarette out in the sink, drops the butt into bucket of compostables.

“...that goes in the trash, you animal.”

“And back to insults. Are you here to kill me or flirt me to death?”

“You have a strange definition of flirting.”

“Yeah, well, you never met my first couple boyfriends.”

A pause, and then Death sounds almost offended. “Are you comparing me to the meth dealer or the guy with the indie band who left you on the side of a road in Ohio.”

Huh. Okay. He’s still puzzling out the rules for what Death knows. The apparition seems to represent his life after the SEP -- the war-- but it has occasional random insights into his life in Indiana.

“Little of column A, little of column B… the Ghost of Bad Choices Past.”  He turns away to start doing the breakfast dishes. He can feel Death behind him, but his back doesn’t crawl. “I almost missed you when you were gone, you know. That couple months between the Middle East and getting to South America. It’s almost comfortable, having you bitching at me. I can’t figure out why.”

“You know, Jack.”

“I really don’t. Is this my way of working through that love/hate thing with Adawe?”

“What about her?” Death sounds genuinely bewildered.

Jack’s brow furrows. Another little drop of information doled out to him. He presses back, wonders if he can get Death to drop another name. He’s already got ‘Moira’, but he needs more to go on.  “...him. Joseph Adawe. The dual threat. Supermodel and hard sell recruiter.”

"You know that isn't his name.”

"Yes, but I don't know what his name is,” Jack prompts. “So."

There's a ringing silence. He looks over his shoulder. The empty skull mask is staring owlishly at him. Or the owl mask is staring skullishly.

Jack rolls his eyes and turns away. He's used to the staring; it's easy to ignore by now. Like he said, almost comfortable. He rinses his dinner dish, sets it in the rickety dishrack to drip dry onto a stained paper towel.

He shouldn’t be feeding his delusion. He needs to not talk to Death. One of these days he’s going to slip and he’ll be doing bitchy banter with nobody in public. He doesn’t even know if the flashes of insight are real; they might be complete nonsense.

...but he’d be lonely.

But that’d be better than psychosis.

He reaches for the pills on the microwave. The little bottle rattles hollowly when he shakes it; two or three more. He's already taken his morning dose, he shouldn't take another, but-

"You're taking too many of those."

"And somehow you're still here," he says, despite his resolution to ignore the specter.

There's a clatter, the squeal of a kitchen chair, and suddenly Death is on him in a whirl of smoke, grabbing his face with a clawed hand and staring into his eyes. There’s red light deep in the eyesockets, burning eyes--

It’s all too real, suddenly, the missing terror is on him. This has never happened before, the delusions never get violent, there’s threats but there’s never--

His heart is slamming in his chest as he shoves Death away. The phantom doesn’t give this time, doesn’t turn into smoke-- feels like leather and kevlar under his hands. Heavy. Real. The raccoon finally wakes up, hissing in his brain, and he finds a kitchen knife in his hand.

The hand on his chin dissolves and reappears wrapped around his wrist, pushing it back against the counter. Fuck. What is he doing? What if there's someone actually here, what if he stabs the phantom and comes out of it and one of his neighbors is bleeding on the knife?  He drops it on the counter.

"Who am I?" Death snarls.

"Is this a trick question?" Blasé sarcasm has been his fear response since before he knew that 'blasé' didn’t rhyme with ‘raise’, so even as the adrenaline charges up and down him and his arm strains with deferred motion, his eyebrows lift, his eyelids droop. His lips are trembling, but they're still set in a prissy little purse.

"Who am I?"

"I don't know," he says, with all the dignity he can muster.

"You don't know."

"My guilt. My trauma. My suppressed memories. I don't know. Do I get a lifeline? Am I warm or cold?"

" _You don't know._ " Death drops his wrist and takes a step back.

"I mean. Obviously, you're death," he muses. The knife is already in his hand again. He closes his eyes, snarls at himself, drops it into the sink. "I was a soldier, I killed people. I must have. I know I did."

Silence.

He opens his eyes.  Death is gone. His kitchen table has been shoved to one side; the chair is overturned on the floor. There are thin scratches down his wrist, just raised red lines. He thinks of the knife in the sink. Imagines himself staring blankly as he draws the blade along his own arm. He's lucky he didn't break skin. He's lucky he didn't do worse.

He slides down the cabinet and puts his head in his arms and shakes.

\--

_Jack Morrison is twenty five going on incredibly old. He’s currently a prisoner of an unknown organization that’s pretending to be the SEP program._

_\He's been through several days of sustained conditioning. A lot of very well-trained, dangerous people wearing lab coats and fake badges have cycled in and out. He calls them all 'doctor', because he knows he's supposed to. They aren't. They're guards and handlers. The muscle backing up Doctor MacAllister, the odd-eyed sadist who's actually in charge of him. They hulk behind her when she draws yet another vial of blood, asks yet more pressing questions about his SEP treatments._

_Today, as a welcome break, he's been put into real clothes._

_One of his handlers--a woman in her mid-thirties, with a face that makes him furious for no knowable reason, tells him he's going to report to MEDCOM to talk to the program head. 'Undersecretary Adawe', and that rings bells but sounds wrong._

_It's his first chance to really take in the facility he's imprisoned in-- it's definitely medical, wherever it is, and incredibly modern.  He knows better than to gawk out the windows._

_They sit him in a dark room, headphones over his ears. He waits in the dark, half-napping as an almost subaudible voice instructs him. It's like a cut-rate meditation track. 'You are bording the plane.' 'Hear the hum of the engines.' 'Feel the rumble.' 'You take water from the flight attendant.'_

_After maybe half an hour, the lights come back on and his handler escorts him back out._

_Jesus, this has to be a joke. They're in the same place. They can't actually think he's buying this. The other shoe has to drop some time. But as long as they're letting him, he'll map the place. He notes vents, exits, windows. Things snap to his notice as if they're highlighted; laser emitters dotted along the sides of a picture window, seams in the wall where emergency doors could slide. The writing on the wall is in-- is that farsi or arabic? They use the same alphabet, right?_

_Whatever it's in, he doesn't understand most of it, but he does catch a pattern he recognizes. 'Electrical room'. Reading it is an odd sensation; it only works when he doesn't think about it. As soon as he focuses on the words, the certainty is gone; it's just graceful script._

_Still. Electrical room. That's useful._

_Now that he's quote unquote 'in Texas', he feels safe showing a little curiosity, peeking out the windows, chatting amiably to his handler about how he's never been down South before. Ma took him to New York once or twice, has she ever been?_

_His handler ignores him, not hiding her irritation, and that frees him up to take a more thorough look. It does look like desert, or a landscaped dot in a desert. Jack has never been to San Antonio in his life, he knows somehow that this is the wrong desert.  The sleek medical campus outside, dotted with palms, is-- it makes him itch. Makes him uneasy. It doesn't take the literal writing on the wall to know they aren't in Army MEDCOM._

_He thinks he's been here before._

_His handler leads him to an office, notable for having a nameplate in English and the army seal on the door. She shoves him in; he hears the door slam and lock behind him, and he almost definitely wasn't supposed to notice that either. So he doesn't react. He's getting better than that._

_There's a man behind the desk--_

_Jack's hindbrain rings_ threat threat enemy enemy. _It takes everything he has not to tense to fight, to throw himself either back for the door or forward._

_Undersecretary Adawe looks up, and smiles at Jack, and says: "Ah, Candidate Morrison."_

_Jack snaps a salute, channels all of his nervous energy into it. An inch further he'd have concussed himself._

_The man behind the desk reaches out. "I'm Joseph Adawe."_

_He isn't. Jack knows that that isn't his name the same way he knows that MacAllister isn't Doctor MacAllister's real name._

_Whoever he is, he's ... striking. It's not just his size-- and he would dwarf the average NFL linebacker-- but his charisma, his presence filling the room like expensive cologne._

_"It's good to meet you." He stands, leans easily over his desk to shake Jack's hand. Even at an angle he's got inches on Jack.  His grip on Jack's hand is warm but gentle; he knows he's the strongest man in the room, he doesn't need to resort to petty games to prove it._

_Jack tries not to flinch as a sense memory over takes him-- a crushing grip, blunt impact, stabbing pain._

_He hides it by dipping his head. He looks up through his lashes and puts on his sweetest oh-shucks smile and says, "An honor to meet you, sir."_

_The man who isn't Joseph Adawe smiles at him, warm and approving, and Jack doesn't have to fake his smile in response._

_His hindbrain knows that this man is a threat. His hindbrain is a hot core of rage. But._

_But he's hands down the most attractive man Jack has ever met. He's shaped like a Mister Universe; his bone-structure like a classical sculpture, all the way up to his neatly shaved scalp. His perfect body is wrapped in an expensive suit that probably tailored itself just so it could be a little closer to him; he wears it like he was born in it._

_"It's good to see you feeling well," Adawe-for-lack-of-a-better-name says._

_"Sir?"_

_"Doctor MacAllister told me we had a few near misses with you. We almost lost you." His vowels are careful, and keep striking Jack's ear wrong. Faking the accent? It's a no-where midwestern accent, TV broadcaster perfect._

_"I'm grateful for everything the program's done. I was a little worried myself for a while, but it'll take more than that to wipe out an Indiana boy," Jack says, trying not to overplay his youthful bravado._

_Adawe chuckles. "Well. Good to see you're still in a fighting spirit." His face sobers, almost too smoothly. "You've heard the Doctor's official diagnosis?"_

_"The modifications didn't take," he says, hoping his hangdog expression is convincing. "I'm out of the program."_

_Adawe nods solemnly. "And I'm afraid there's more. There was some brain damage. We can't let you in the field; it would be as dangerous to you as it would be to your fellow soldiers."_

_Oh. Oh, that's calculated._

_Jack lets his shoulders droop, but frankly he's happy to finally find a toehold for the anger in him. Something less than enrapturing about this man._

_"I'm afraid you're simply not suited for combat."_

_A few years ago-- no. However many years ago. When Jack was eighteen or so. Then, this might have worked. He'd have been dazzled by the charm, by the edge. 3 out of 4 of Jack's boyfriend's agree; he doesn't know what's bad for him. He's always liked a strong boy who played a little rough, and he's always had problems drawing the line between 'playful sharpness' and 'outright negging'._

_“I know this comes as a disappointment. We all had high hopes for you, recruit. It’s no fault of yours.” There’s this pity in Adawe’s voice, this sadness that’s killing him. He knows he’s a captive, not a washout, and he still wants to apologize for not cutting it._

_But he's gotten smarter. Oh, it took some hard knocks to get it through his head-- a few bad crying jags in his pickup, the miserable call home when Tucker stranded him in Dayton, that godawful night with Darren when he woke up on someone's lawn-- but he finally learned his lesson. He doesn't let people treat him like this anymore. His boyfriend--_

_And then he's distracted because god, he's so much older, what does that mean for his friends, his family, for Vince? Were they still together when these goons got him? Oh, shit, is he safe?_

_And in the way he knows that Adawe isn't, he when he thinks of his boyfriend, he just feels... a distance. No danger. He thinks. Maybe. Maybe that's just an absence, maybe Vincent's very much in danger. It only redoubles his resolve to get the hell out of here._

_He makes himself focus on Adawe, soothingly telling him that "-you may still be useful, may still do some good for your country-"_

_"Sir, there's nothing I want more than to serve my country," he lies. He thinks: Laser grids instead of physical bars. Electrical room. There's probably backup power but there'll be some amount of delay he can use. Three floors up, two turns, two security doors between his medical suite and the electrical room, but only one floor and one security door between the dark room where he had his fake plane ride. If he's 'In Texas' now they might pretend to fly him back at some point._

_“-We can give you a purpose, Jack. It won’t be easy. Heroism never is. You’ll be helping us build a better future. If you work with us-”_

_He listens to the man who isn't named Adawe  and plots his escape._

__

Jack sits under the sink, back to the cabinets, for a long time.

Even at first, when the hallucination was silent and stalking and terrifying, it never broke like this. He’s never hurt himself before.

And he kept going for the knife. He put a young man in the hospital with his fist once. He can’t grab a _knife_ next time.  

He wants to run again. It’s not just his paranoia-- he’s finally in synch with his worst impulses, he, Jack, is scared shitless of himself and of what he sees and wants to just go until he’s alone with nothing but a wall behind him and nobody in front of him. .

He’s not going to run.

He’s staying _here._ His friends are _here._ Everything he has, everyone who cares about him, is here.

But. He can’t stay in this apartment. He’s jittering out of his skin.  There’s hours before his shift starts-- ushering at Bianca’s tonight. He’d been thinking of dressing up for it, but…

He bites his lip, scrambles up and almost bolts for the bedroom. His ancient old brick of a phone is still plugged into the wall; he jerks the cord free and dials, settling as it starts to connect.

A husky contralto answers before he can work himself into real worry. “Perl, no a, what can I do for you?”

“Hey, Perl. It’s Ken. This a good time?”

“It is for me. Doesn’t sound like it’s a good time for you, though.” The omnic’s voice shades sharp. It’s-- very protective for its people and it decided very early on that Jack was one of its people.

“It’s not. Can I come over? Until my shift? Bring some stuff and come over?”

“Of course, Ken-doll. You need me to come over? Are you safe?”

“No. No, I’m safe, I’m just having a bad brain day.”

“...call back if you need me to come over.”

He smiles painfully. Perl’s good people. He doesn’t want to put itin danger.

“I’ll call. I promise.”

“Mwah,” Perl tells the phone. No lips to smack, just a prim articulated ‘mwah.’

“Mwah,” Jack answers, smiling raggedly at nothing before he hangs up. 

Perl is-- it’s not just the only person he’s trusted with the truth, the omnic is his friend. A chrome-plated omnium-built mother hen that took one look at a human trashfire and decided to adopt.

It understands the need to reinvent. There’s still a swarm drone’s build under the pink plating and the newer, friendlier face plate. N-45s were making a name for themselves before anyone came up with the idea for a Soldier Enhancement Program; Perl’s probably older than he is.  

He hasn’t asked how it got from sharing a head with sixty swarm-members and a God program to hanging out in a drag bar a couple nights a week. It hasn’t asked him about the SEP. They don’t need to know these things about each other.

...he’s pretty sure he could disable Perl if he was lucky. It had its weapons removed years ago, not long after it Awakened to sentience. It’s a devout pacifist, it’s scrubbed its brain of its deadliest abilities.

It’s still probably the best candidate to stop a super soldier if he has a bad episode. He hates the risk. He hates that Perl’s been afraid of him.

He’s glad he’s got it to lean on. It and a dozen other strangers who decided he was someone worth saving.

Fuck Death, fuck the raccoon. He's not running any further than his friend's door. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter would not have been possible without the kind guidance and stern editing of RoboCryptid, who helped untangle a lot of bullshit in its middle draft. All mistakes remaining were added after the fact and the management apologizes.

Time sprints and stumbles as he packs up to head over-- as he’s putting a change of clothes and a couple shipping boxes into a duffel bag, he feels every second he wastes pulling him closer to another run-in with his own dysfunction. Then suddenly he’s standing outside the door and locking it behind him, staring at his key like he’s never seen it before.  He feels like he’s moving through deep water as he descends the stairs to the street, like his ears need to pop, and then it’s two miles later and he’s standing in front of another door and knocking and he’s lucky it’s the right one.

Perl opens the door between the third and fourth knock, and his tangled sense of reality suddenly unknots and runs smooth at the sight of its gleaming pink plating.

It reaches out for him, takes the duffel bag effortlessly and scoops him firmly into its apartment.

“Gave me a scare, doll,” it chides him, looking him up and down. It zeroes in instantly on the scratches on his wrist, taking his arm and scanning it in frequencies that make its eyes go blue-white. “What happened?”

“...so you know how I see Death sometimes? Saw him again. Pills aren’t cutting it. He was in the kitchen today. It was-- different, it wasn’t just moving my shit. He attacked me. That’s never happened before--”

Perl makes a considering sound, a low thoughtful fuzz of Brownian noise. “...that’s bad.”

“Yeah.”

He’s already reconsidering being here. He’s not safe.

“What if I see him here.”

“You’ve never seen him outside your place,” Perl reminds him, and he knows that’s true but it has more weight when it’s another person. It shores up his resolution. “And you’ve never seen him when someone else was around.”

“But if he’s -- if my brain is changing things up-”

“Just tell me. The second he shows up, okay? And I’ll talk you through it.”

“Don’t let me get close if I get dangerous. Please, Perl-”

“I won’t,” it soothes. “I won’t. I know what you can do, Doll. I won’t let you do it to me.”

“Thank you,” he breathes wretchedly. It sets his duffel aside and spreads its arms: he slides into the opening, pressing close to its anodized plating. He hears mechanisms shift in its torso as it folds around him, hydraulics locking its limbs into a defensive cage, and then it stills and there’s just the quiet hum of its power distribution unit.

It’s a disturbing sound, but he learned to associate it with comfort more than anything with reassuring quickness. His past doesn’t own him. His lost memories don’t completely drive him.

He shudders, wraps his arms around its torso, clings like a climber to a rock. His stubble scratches against matte finish as he snuggles in, wedging his own head against the stubby central stalk of its neck, rests his hip against the unmoving curve of its leg.  

“Thanks, Perl.”

“Always, doll.”

He lets himself stay in the defensive cradle of its body until he’s past the paranoia and into feeling sheepish about the paranoia-- until the encounter in the kitchen feels distant and the scratches on his arm have healed into nothingness.  Then he sighs deeply, gives it a soft knock on the torso.

It unfolds. Do its other friends recognize it going from turret to mobile mode? Do they know that when it tucks them in a hug that they’re where the back half of a wicked plasma cannon would be?

Do they know how safe they are?

“Feeling better, Ken-doll?”

He smiles softly at it, bumps his forehead against its cheek, then his lips. “Mwah.” Just the syllable, not the actual smack of a kiss. Perl couldn’t feel a pressure differential that small.

It turns its mouthless faceplate against his hair. “Mwah,” it synthesizes. Then, fussy: “You need to eat?”

Always, but not more than usual. “I had breakfast.”

“What’s in the bag? You need to stay a few days?”

“It’s not toiletries. It’s just stuff I wanted with me. I wasn’t really thinking clearly.”

“That’s okay. Want me to put it up somewhere?”

“No.” He frowns. “No, I should go through it. Try to get my head in order.”

“Should I make space or--?”

“Or.” He crouches over the duffel, rifles through the odds and ends he’d grabbed in his fugue. His makeup kit is inside-- he’d correctly prioritized hiding his face-- but he’s looking for the secondhand photo album.

“Ooh, do we scrapbook?”

“Absolutely.” He deposits himself and the album on the couch, pats the empty space next to him. “This is my ‘precious memories I don’t have’ collection. If it makes sense to you, you’re doing better than me.”

Perl sits and reaches for the book with a questioning hum. He hesitates as a wave of mistrust swells up-- and like he usually does, responds to it with a mental middle finger and scoots the book onto Perl’s chromed lap.

There’s an almost subaudible whine as the top of its index finger slides over itself, locking into a claw extension-- for climbing, combat, and leafing very carefully through scrapbooks.

“Soooo this is a conspiracy book.” It pauses over a yellowing scrap of tabloid. _Alien super soldiers?! Overwatch secret UFO department infiltrates Brazilian government!!_  

“You’ve seen my place. I didn’t have room for a whole wall.’

“That you don’t.” Its eyes dim in disapproval as it flicks to another page. “Ken-doll. The Horizon, sure, the truth is out there. But the Daily Mail?”

_Rogue Strike! Overwatch flouts British Sovereignty, launches attack!_

He shrugs. “It’s all data.”

“It’s anti-omnic retrograde bullshit,” Perl grumbles and flips through, glancing at each page before shuttering through. “...oh, hey, here’s And Friend again, I was starting to miss him, stopped showing up after mid fifties.”

Jack leans over its shoulder to look at the article that stopped it. His heart twists in his chest, wringing a little more pain and surprise out of the dry old husk of him.

“Vincent,” he says, voice threadbare.

“Really? Because the papers seem pretty sure his name is And Friend. Jack Morrison and Friend Celebrate End of Crisis, Jack Morrison and Friend Enjoy Dinner in Paris, Jack Morrison and Friend attend-- oh.”

“--Funeral of Jamie Morrison, yeah.”

Graying, somber Strike Commander Jack Morrison is central in the press photo-- his eyes slide off his own face, his alien body in a dress uniform studded with medals, his blank eyes inside a mask of dignified mourning. A step away to his left, a civilian in a sharp suit, grief more open on his face.

“That’s my boyfriend.” Twist. “Was. My boyfriend. I don’t know when that happened.” He reaches out, taps the light smudge of a band just visible on Vincent’s left hand.

His own hands, crossed in front of him in the photo, are conspicuously empty.

“Oh,” Perl says again.

There are two figures a pace behind and to his right, eyes on him. They tug at his eyes like Vincent does, and he lingers again. Looks at them, a man and a woman in dress uniforms, like this time his searching thoughts will find what they’re reaching for.

Ana Amari is dead. He doesn’t remember meeting her, he knows nothing about her except her public records, but seeing her face makes a part of him go numb. Her sharp, sad eyes are fixed on Strike Commander Morrison’s back, and he thinks-- maybe she could see through the glossy bullshit, maybe she knew him.  There’s no grief for like there is for his pa. Maybe it’s in the numb part.

...but he knew 24 before. Knew him for less than a year, was closer than family by the end of month one. One of a desperately close kinship of government lab rats-- mutual survival pact signatories, blood-of-the-covenant close to one another. The other Numbers didn’t make it out of the war and he feels the shredding loss of them, but 24 just makes his brain scramble and stop. Christ, is it possible he actually became so alienated from his closest friend that he can’t grieve for him either?

Who is this hollow-eyed creep standing a respectful distance away from Jack’s boyfriend and his complementary number, wearing a distorted copy of his own face?

He closes his eyes against a sudden headache, and the sound of Perl flipping the page is loud and decisive.

"So,” it says, too brightly. “This is a mess. And you printed out some of these articles. Onto paper. Ken-doll, let's talk about the exciting world of data storage--"

"I don't trust it. I don't know who can read it. I only look this stuff up on public kiosks.”

Perl swivels its head ninety degrees to look straight at him without moving its torso, round optical ports steady green, one arm touching its chin in a very human affectation. "Uh-huh. So. Is a tinfoil hat part of your drag?"

"Come on, you know humans leave patterns everywhere they go, if I'm important enough to the black-uniform gang to put real effort into a search..." He trails off. "...and I sound like my dad. They said this would happen."

"He was a paranoid conspiracy theorist?"

“Something like that.” He smiles painfully at the memory. “Used to argue with him about it, try to get him to link his accounts up and get with the times. Wouldn’t keep data on a cloud connection, he was so old fashioned… he was a good guy, though. He just wanted us to be safe.”

Perl looks back down at the scrapbook. “I’m sorry.”

“No, that’s not--”

He doesn’t have the energy to explain, the article was from pa’s funeral and not dad’s. That Frank Morrison’s tabloid name was ‘And Family Friend’ and his funeral happened after Jack’s own.

He slides the book back onto his own lap and shuts it.

Well. At least he’s not panicking anymore.

“Ken. Honey.” The clawed tip of Perl’s finger slides back into place, leaving an almost seamless rounded surface that combs through his thinning hair gently.

“No, I’m not brooding. I’m fine.” He runs his hands over his eyes, stinging with tears that won’t come.  “I’m going to put my face on.” He feels safer with his face re-contoured-- it makes him feel more secure than a pulled-low ballcap ever could. “Maybe try to paste a beauty look over this hamburger.”

“Oh, hush, your skin isn’t bad for your age.”

“What there is of it, you mean.”

“Humans love damaged tissue. Everyone says so. Pain is temporary--”

“--Bones heal, scars look cool.” He smiles wanly. “Thanks, coach. I’m all pepped up.”

The scrapbook goes back in the bag, his makeup case comes out. He leans on Perl’s shoulder on the way to the bathroom, and it hums at him reassuringly.

He’s scrubbing off his second try at a smokey eye when Perl looks in.

“I was thinking of calling some of the crew over. Dot, maybe. She’s got makeup samples from work… little primer might keep that stuff from sliding right off your face.”

“Aww, you’re so sweet.”

“And maybe someone who can help you with your old man technophobia.”

“You really think I’m being paranoid? With the hard copy? I just-- if whoever’s looking for me figures out, if they come after Vince, anyone--”

“I was thinking if there’s people you need to check on, Tash can--” A pause. “Got Dot on the phone. She’s getting vicariously day drunk with MJ, you mind more company?”

Someday he’s going to stop being shocked that his omnic friends can have a phone conversation in their head. “More the merrier, I don’t need elbow room.”

“They’ll be over in a minute. Tash can get you a secure connection,” Perl says, skipping between tones as it completes its earlier thought.

The temptation is immediate. “Tash has better things to do than help me social-media stalk my ex.”

“Oh, they’d love it.”

He ponders that, makes a third attempt at something with his eyes-- yeah, that’s not sticking. The eyeliner stays in place, but the powder vanishes after two blinks.

“Okay. Okay, If they’re free, sure.”

“Calling them now. Wait, incoming call--”

There’s a thump on the stairs outside, another thump-- as fast, regular, and heavy as a hydraulic press. Jack’s heart jumps into his throat.

“Is that Ruby? Tell her we know.”

The rhythmic thudding stops outside Perl’s door, and there’s the soft click of big metal fingers with coarse pressure sensors closing carefully around the doorknob. Jack steps out of the bathroom.

“Come in!” Perl calls.

Ruby has to step sideways through the door, leading with a hand clutching a dainty little leather bag. Well. It looks dainty. Ruby makes most things look dainty.

Seeing the big automotive welder defuses the ghost impulses that he’s about to come under gunfire. Jack relaxes against the bathroom door. “I can hear your pumps going. Did you run all the way here?”

“It’s not like I’m far,” Ruby says dismissively. “I came as soon as Dot told me you were going to take the plunge! She promised to tell me as soon as you did. Ken! I’m so proud!”

“Dot’s chatty,” Jack sighs. “What if I wanted it to be a surprise?”

“Don’t be like that. I brought you something.” Ruby offers him the case.

“Thanks,” He says automatically, taking it and opening it to reveal a nested assortment of mesh bags, each one wrapped around a bundle of cloth.  “Wait--”

“Tada!”

Jack opens a bag and starts to dig through the cloth-- knows the feeling of synthetic hair instantly.

“Ruby, you didn’t have to--” he extracts the wig, holds it carefully-- it’s a short cut, just a punky puff of powder-blue. “

“It’s something to start on.”

“Your training hair! I thought you got rid of it,” Perl says. “She used to--”

“I was young and unpracticed, kill your synth!”

“--SHE USED TO have the worst problems getting long wigs caught in her neck joints. We had to untangle her every night. Elisa said her signature fragrance was burnt acrylic. She was banned until she switched to short cuts.”

“But that was years ago and work hair like I was born with it, so it can be your practice hair now!”

He sets the case down, grinning like a loon, and ducks back into the bathroom. The wig isn’t all that much longer than his own hair, and storage has flattened it out a little-- but look, a hairline that isn’t halfway back his scalp! He fluffs the blue tufts into shape.

“I didn’t know what color you use, so I brought them all?”

“I used to do blond and pastels?”

“Oh great! I was into metallics. You know, trying to look--” Ruby’s fingers click loudly as she brings them together for air quotes: “‘natural.’”

Perl’s husky chuckle tips him over into his own laughter.  

“It’s fantastic. Come here!” He darts out of the bathroom, wraps his arms as far around Ruby as they’ll go, squeezing. She pats him delicately on the back, the lights in her eyes slivering into happy crescents.

They all hear the quieter steps on the stairs, so they’re expecting Dot and MJ-- MJ bursting in first, with her eyes sparkling and her face a little flushed.

“Is that Ruby’s practice hair?”

“Yeah! Look, he’s cute!” Ruby pats his head with a perfectly flat palm, careful not to disturb the wig.

“He’s adorable. Do you have anything for shaping?”

“A girdle. Some falsies in a bra…”

“You’re going to look like a fridge with two halves of a soccer ball glued to it,” MJ tuts.  “Hit me up after your shift tonight; I have some training tits to give you.”

“I couldn’t--”

“Not without a turtleneck, you can’t, they’re not your color, but it’s okay. It’s why I kept them after I got mine. I knew somebody’d need them.” MJ dimples.

“Speaking of color matching.” Dot slips past her friend with the whisper-quiet steps of her current-model customer-facing body, holographic face set in a cool customer-facing expression.

She pops a chunk of her chest out-- it lights up in bright full spectrum light when she holds it in her palm, and Jack squints away as she raises it to his face. “Oh. You’re going to be a challenge. You know that foundation’s the wrong color?”

He does. He nods ruefully.

“I thought you could use some of the colors I get for Corona, but you’ve got much cooler tones. I’ve seen highlighters you could use as foundation.”

“Struggle of my life. At least Barbie’s supposed to look like she does her face with housepaint. A porcelain line isn’t a deal killer.  I can work out of the drug store for a while, but I need some decent primer--”

“I came prepared.” She pops the flashlight back into her chest. She waves her arm in a gesture that marries cocking a shotgun with sleight of hand, and voila: she’s holding a black tube. “Silicon pore eraser: for when you’re human but you don’t want to look like it.” Her facial display winks. “First one’s free.”

His nose wrinkles. “You’re a pusher. How much of an arm and a leg is the next one?”

“Oh, I’ll give you my employee discount. So only 85 percent of a limb.”

“Done.” He snatches it and ducks back into the bathroom, shutting the door on the rest of them. “You can see in a minute!”

Ruby rumbles her disappointment-- there’s the clang of metal on metal and Perl’s voice shooing them away.

He scrubs his face clean, dries it on Perl’s faded old towel, and starts again. It’s therapeutic, patting little dabs of the primer into the deep lines around his eyes, filling his rugged pores. He uses it to smooth the harsh lines of the scars that slice down his face. God knows what the next tube is going to cost him and he’s already hooked.

His drug store makeup goes on smoother, holds better. Under his fingertips and sponges, an old familiar face stars to take shape.

“Ken! Tash is here!”

“Out in a second!”

He’s in that half formed place where things haven’t come together yet. His lips are naked, his wigline is tragic, he’s going to have to do something about his lashes. But there’s potential, there. There’s something.

“Come out, we want to gossip about your ex!”

“I’m not done. I’m letting everything set,” he warns, opening the door. “Be gentle.”

“Never.” Dot greets him with her full spectrum light, and while he’s reeling from that his friends swarm him, several sets of hands turning his head back and forth and critiquing him in an overlapping stream of theoretical helpfulness.

He catches glimpses of a small human figure holed up on the couch-- Tash, hunched over a pad, doing something hackery and complicated.

“How does she look, though?” Ruby frets from behind the fashion police, bobbing her head in and out like that will improve her facial recognition abilities.

“She’s getting there,” MJ says.  

“It’s a little muddy, no?” Dot says archly.

“Look, bronzer just turns that color on me, it’s a curse--”

“-and you put down eyeliner like you’re redacting state secrets-”

“Intentional!”

“But it’s not hopeless,” the omnic finishes, holographic lips in a reserved little smile.

“Stop. You’re making me blush,” he says dryly, and waves their hands away. “Shoo. Let it bake. It’ll look better when I get my lips on.”

Dot lifts a brow. “And the right shade of mascara.”

“Maybe next paycheck.”

“It’s fine,” Perl says. “It’s cute.”

He ducks out of the swarm of friendly judgement, taking shelter behind Ruby. “Tash? Is that pad ready?”

“...yeah…” the hacker says vaguely. “Wait, what? Oh, hey, Ken. Cute. Here, this is ready.” They offer the pad, and Jack grabs it like a lifeline.

“Thank you VERY much.”

“Yeah, sure.” They bob a nod. “Any time.”

“What do you need a secure pad for?” MJ asks, draping over his shoulder. “You don’t have a restraining order, do you? That’s not cute.”

“I don’t.”

“He has a thing about computers,” Perl says in a synthesized stage whisper.

“I’m cautious.”

“Because he’s old,” Perl adds.

He ignores it, fingers hovering over the onscreen keyboard, hammering out a name before he can chicken out.

_Vincent Prakash-Tischbein._

The feed loads immediately-- top of the list is a picture, two men with arms looped around each other in front of an endless expanse of blue. The post is dated to last week.

“Which one’s the ex?” MJ says, and he tries to form an answer but for a second he’s stuck, just staring.

Academically he knows Vincent is in his fifties. It’s been months, he should have had time to process that. It shouldn’t still feel like a car crash in his heart when he sees it.

Look at him. He aged so pretty, he isn't losing his hair, the bastard. It's still thick and shot with silver. Full on Doctor Strange gray at the temples. He must be so happy, the nerd. The dork.

His husband is a handsome, heavyset white man with curly more-salt-than-pepper hair, younger than Vincent-- Jack’s only risked the lightest glances at the two mens’ life, afraid that someone will know somehow, that he’ll send the black uniform brigade to Vince’s door.

He knows his husband is named Joseph and goes by Joey. That he’s a few years younger than Vincent. That they’ve been planning this trip to the Great Lakes for months.

This picture means that Vincent is safe.

This picture means that Vincent is married. Not to Jack; to another man, who fits against Vincent like the places they touch are worn smooth.

When did he and Jack stop? Why? When did he break that promise to himself, too?

What did he do?

“So, which one broke your heart?” Dot asks. He didn’t realize she’d come up beside him, peering over his other shoulder.

“It was friendly, okay?” He hopes. “I’m not going to cry about it, I just want to check in on him.”

“Come on,” MJ coaxes. “Hawaiian shirt farmer’s tan, or polo shirt silver fox?”

“Polo shirt,” he admits.

“Is he cute?” Ruby demands.

“For a human? Eh.” Dot shrugs.

“He’s in computer science. He builds advanced human interfaces.” Jack says softly. “He’s amazing.”

“Are you sure you aren’t going to cry? You kind of look like you’re going to cry,” Dot says ruthlessly. She gives the picture a haughty look and reaches over his shoulder, unyielding metal arm digging into his own. “I’m going to leave a message on his picture. Three stars out of five, good lighting, squinting too much, made Ken cry-”

“Don’t leave a _message_ -”

“It’s anonymous, don’t worry-”

Dot reaches over his shoulder and taps the comment box. The cursor blinks once, and freezes, and an error message pops up.

 _Surf with caution!_  The bold letters start to flash.

“I was joking! I wasn’t going to type anything!” Dot hurriedly swipes to dismiss the error, making another pop up. “Tash, how do I turn this off?”

“What?” Tash worms peers over. “That’s not part of my security, what is that?”

Suddenly the volume on the tablet starts to turn itself up of its own accord. Another message box pops up, no text, just a purple sugar skull, jaw working in time with the tinny voice coming through the speakers. _Caution!_

 _Caution!_ the text flashes. The volume is still raising, the garbled voice chanting _Cuidado_ , _Cuidado_ , making the short hairs on the back of his neck lift.

He knows this purple skull, he knows this--

Dot shrieks. Perl's eyes go red, and it slaps the tablet out of Jack's hand, moving between him and the device like it might explode. He hears the heavy slam of Ruby backing away-- the crunch as she hits the wall and the plaster gives. He hears something break, hears the frantic clicking of Dot skittering away, the couch goes sliding with a shriek and thump, there’s a grunt of pain-

Jack and Perl lunge for the pad at the same time. Jack jams the power contact. It doesn't respond, but he wasn't expecting it to.

"The Shadow Collective," says Tash, in a shaking voice, from somewhere in the vicinity of the couch.

"Turn it off," Dot snaps. Jack looks behind him and she’s backed all the way into the kitchen and crawling up the counters with her arms reversed like a spider. Her voice scrapes in the higher register, metallic and tinny. "Turn it off, turn it-"

Perl whips the pad out of Jack's grasp, takes it between both hands and rips it down the center like a piece of paper. Polymer shatters as the screen protector goes. Perl peels the flexible display away from the printed microcircuitry and pops the wireless receiver between its fingers, then the little solid state memory bead.

There's a long silence, broken only by human breathing and traffic noise.

Jack assesses the damage. Tash found high ground on the couch, but MJ is flattened up against the wall clutching her nose. At least one of Perl’s planters hit the ground-- there’s a spray of ceramic around Ruby’s feet, glittering in a snow of plaster dust from the sizeable dent in the wall beside her.  

Ruby says: "...oh, crap. Perl, your tillandsia." She folds down to her knees with synthetic precision, her big hands lifting a crumpled mess of green leaves. The plant's central spike is broken, shedding flowers.

"It'll survive." Perl drops the halves of the pad onto the coffee table, reaching out protectively for the mangled plant.

"What was that?" MJ asks through her hands. There are smudges of red between her fingers . "Are we good now? What the hell?"

“It’s over," Tash says quietly, looking at the sad remainders of their pad.

Jack stirs into action, reaching out to steer her into the little bathroom. “Come on, lean over the sink.”

“Yes, mom,” she mutters.

It echoes in his head, there and gone, and he doesn’t bother to chase it. He passes her tissues as she pinches her nose, waiting for the bleed to stop.

Perl and Ruby start to clean up in the other room, nobody talking.

"It couldn't have been them," Ruby says, finally. "We’re dumb. It's just some kid's stupid hoax. Some twelve year old with their first injection kit."

"On my hardware?" Tash says. "Through my security?"

"What _was_ it?" MJ demands, a little nasally. She steps out of the bathroom with tissue still clamped over her face, and Jack follows with the towel in case.  "Some kind of malware?"

"No. Sort of." Tash shakes their head. "Ken, Perl-- you were expecting that?" It's not accusatory, but Jack feels a stab of guilt just the same.

"Ken was expecting something," Perl says quietly. It tucks another fallen plant back onto its shelf. "That's why I called you. He was being paranoid about someone trying to track him online, I thought he just needed some reassurance. I should have listened, Ken-doll." It rotates its head maybe two degrees toward him.

He shakes his head instantly. "I sounded crazy to me, too. You didn't know. I didn't know."

"Know what?!" MJ snaps, exasperated.

"Remember the Lumerico hacking about a year ago?" Dot asks. Her projected face is flickering, off and on, with lingering strain. "And the blackout in Dorado? That group of hackers? The Shadow Collective. That's their call sign."

MJ glances between her face and Tash. "You're kidding."

"They got through my security," Tash says numbly. "They overrode my hard cutoff switch, those sons of bitches. Fused the contacts together." They hold up a piece of circuitry that Jack can't make out, but it's upset the programmer enough to make their hands tremble.

"I had a friend doing security for a datastore they hit. He lost six months of memory and a motive processor. He's still relearning how to walk," Dot says bitterly. "A power switch is nothing. They don't care about hardware damage."

MJ's lips part. "Why are they stalking some software designer’s social media page? Is he a target?"

"No,” Jack says. It comes out croaky, a syllable with more weight to it than his lungs were ready to push.  "Please. God. I hope he isn't."

They’re all staring at him.

"I think it's me. I'm the target. ...I should have said something before. I knew people were looking for me, but I thought I shook them."

Perl crosses over to him. “Ken--”

“...I’m the target.”

His eyes flick to the door and meet pink metal. Perl’s hand is cupped, a horse blinder.

“No. Absolutely not.”

“What?” Dot snaps.

“ _Someone_ is thinking of running off to hide in a cargo container because he thinks it’s for the greater good. Someone thinks it will be _okay_ if he’s the only target.” Perl takes his chin, turns it away from the door. “Someone has another think coming.”

“Ken, you’re confused, please calm down,” Tash pleads.

“I am. I really am confused, but not about this. I’m the target and I’m putting you at risk by staying--”

“You don’t know that! You don’t know that they know where you are. They know you accessed a social media post, that’s all.” It sounds calm but there’s a ringing on the edge of his hearing, a fan whining with overload down near its core. “What’s done is done, leaving won’t fix that. It’ll just leave you alone again.”

He lifts a hand, lays it on his chassis. He can feel the vibration through it. “Okay. You’re right. You’re right.”

“That’s right I am.” Perl’s eyes settle slowly, brighten back to steady state with only the occasional flicker.

“...are you okay, P?”

“Fine. I’m fine.”

“Liar,” he murmurs, thumping its chest. The fan starts to wind down. Whatever processor it was overworking must be stabilizing.  “We’re going to talk about this later.”

“Later,” it mutters.

“So what now?” MJ asks. Her nose has stopped bleeding, but her mouth is still a smear of red, drying blood against lipstain.

Jack looks his friends over, trying not to worry. Can’t not worry. None of them would stand up against the black uniform brigade. Tash’s hands are still shaking.

“I think… I’m going to stay off the internet for a while. Is there a way to know if they traced it back here?”

Tash nods slowly. “It’ll take some time. I’ll have to dig into a lot of server logs. But I can find that out.”

“That’s… please. Do that.” He exhales. “I’m sorry.”

“I need to know why this happened.” Tash has pulled themself together, slim shoulders squared. “Not right now. But. I need to know what you know. I’ve got better countermeasures than this. This was like, six out of ten on the scale of what I can do. Just tell me what we’re up against.”

Jack glances at Perl, head tipped in a question. Perl nods slightly.

“Yeah. We will.”

“So.” MJ brushes dried blood from her face. “Um. Gonna clean up, maybe go have another beer. Or three.”

“Yeah, I could do with an or three myself,” Tash admits.

“Can I tag along?” Jack says, and immediately kicks himself. Nobody here wants him to--

“Yeah, sure,” MJ says instantly. “We can stop at my place and see if I have any old stuff that’ll fit you, too.” As she heads into the bathroom, over the tap, she calls-- “Do you have shoes?”

“Nothing I can bounce in.”

“You’re what, half a size off me? Let’s raid my shoe collection.” She pokes her head out of the bathroom. “Come in here. I have to redo my lips, I can do yours too.”

Gratitude overwhelms him. The way everyone is acting as if what happened is at all normal, is-- “Thanks,” he says, and it’s a pitiful understatement.

“No problem!” MJ waves it off like he’s only talking about the borrowed lipstain. “It’s berry, it’ll set off your makeup.”

“It’s going to turn pink. It all turns pink. Family curse.”

“That’s rough,” Dot says sympathetically. Her face has completely stabilized. “I have something for that, though.”

“I’ll let you know when I’m ready to sell 85 percent of my soul, okay?" 

"You do that, Ken." 

 

In the bathroom he uses lipliner to draw in the lips that god didn’t see fit to grant him. MJ touches up the shaky lines for him and produces a little bottle of lipstain with a brand label that makes his wallet cringe in horror.

“Not Marc Jacobs.”

“Yes Marc Jacobs. Off-brand for Los Muertos, real stuff for friends. Don’t move…” she sweeps the color onto his lips carefully. “Smack your lips. Good. All done! What do you think?”

He looks in the mirror-- god, it’s less mutton dressed up as lamb and more some kind of prehistoric sheep ancestor. And MJ’s perfectly applied lipstain has gone pink in a way that clashes fiercely with his pastel blue eyes and wig.

That’s okay. Barbie likes pink. And she was always too dumb to care if people laughed at her. She’s airheaded and basic and so very brave.

He widens his eyes and pouts, and she pouts back at him-- and then smiles, as he smiles.

She’s older. Taken a little damage. Very much a second hand doll. But there she is.

“Come on, Barbie,” he murmurs to the reflection. “Let’s go party.”

 

* * *

It’s three-am when he trudges up the steps to his apartment, walking carefully on his borrowed wedges. Someone talked him into going out dancing after his shift and it was a terrible mistake and he hurts so good. He can’t stay drunk for long, but he’s tired enough that it sort of feels like being drunk, and he barely hesitates at his own door.

He flips on the light, and Death is waiting for him.

“Late night?”

He shouldn’t engage. If he ignores it, it might go away.

Instead of ignoring it, he shrugs.

“Sombra says you owe her.”

He stops.

Death speaks to him in English and in English _Sombra_ sticks out, glaring. A specific name. A… her. There’s almost an image there, but his mind closes around nothing.

“You owe me, too. You don’t know what I paid her to get into Moira’s notes. You still think you’re in round three, don’t you, 76?”

He sits heavily on his kitchen chair, starts unstrapping his feet. “I remember round three. It’s obviously been just a little while since then.”  He waves at his face.

“You shouldn’t be able to take in new information.”

“Oopsie.” He says it in Barbie’s voice-- in her new voice, deeper and husky but just as vapid as ever.  

Death rattles out a surprised little laugh. “Did any of the conditioning stick?”

“How would I know?”

“Fair point.” Death thinks for a second, and then growls a string of numbers and letters that make Jack tense up in anticipation of a shock.

"...Are you going to tase me now? For old time's sake?"

"You're still on your feet." Another grim chuckle. "Should've dropped you like a rock. Did they give you something about springtime?"

"In springtime a soldier." His lip curls; he directs his ire at the flimsy little buckle that won't come undone. The metal tongue digs itself under his thumbnail and he swears at it. "Wasn't that in the notes?"

"No. But they've used that one before. _Au printemps une danseuse_ ," Death mutters to himself.

A bolt of rage that has nothing to do with his footwear comes out of nowhere and leaves acid in its wake. He wants to know why he's angry about that, but then again... he doesn't. Really. "Never was good at French,” he says instead  

"Round three," Death muses.  Metal claws tick against his chin. "Reaction time enhancement. I wonder. Not like her to be that sloppy, but she's always underestimated you."

"Are you here for a reason?"

"Yes." Death remembers himself and hisses with renewed menace. Out of the corner of his eye Jack can see him puffing like a rooster-- chest out, leather coat flaring. It doesn't scare him like it did in the morning. It should, but it's just cute. He's never been at his smartest when he's tired, what's that old saying about 'more bad decisions at three in the morning'?

"I want to make a deal with you, Jack."

"I've already promised my soul to a beauty rep." The buckle finally gives and the heavy wedge falls to the floor. He makes a blissful sound at the relief of pressure.

"I'm not after your soul. Just a little good behavior." The dark figure prowls around him. He should be cautious. He shouldn't be thinking that Death struts just like a really offended Rhode Island Red.

He nods and bites his lip against a smile and Death goes on.

“I won't tell Talon where you are. Sombra will wipe today's little indiscretion off the map. You just keep your head down and stop poking around in the past."

Death leans past him to put something on the table, and the smell of rust and brimstone and oiled leather is so clear and vivid it makes his head spin.

"Consider this positive reinforcement. If you're good, maybe I'll bring you another one."

His head is ringing with 'Talon'. It chimes in the empty space like a bell, loud enough to bring on a migraine."...you're a hallucination."

"I'm not."

Holes in the pillow. Scratches on his wrist. The smell of decay. He pinches the bridge of his nose. "You turn into smoke."

Death shrugs. Leather creaks. "It's a thing I do."

"I'm not sure I prefer demon stalker to hallucination."

"This has never been about what you prefer."

"I don't know. You seem pretty invested."

Death pulls back a little, and there's a beat of hesitation before he leans back in. "It's business, Jackie. If you're here, you're not making my life difficult. If you're happy playing diva you aren't breaking heads in Dorado. It's mutually beneficial. Don't read too much into it."

He grins against the ebbing headache. "Okay! Reading is haaard."

"Goddammit, Jack." Death turns away in a huff, stomping dramatically for the three whole steps he can take in the little kitchen. "Just try to keep a low profile for once in your life."

"Plan to. I can't speak for Barbie, though."

"Talon's not looking for Barbie. Barbie can do whatever." Pause. "...I admit. I was curious. Never got to meet her before."

"This definitely isn't her at her best." He glances down at his unpadded body, at the unfortunate silhouette of his stuffed bra. "This is like... Barbie's little sister's lab partner. This is nothing."

"You look good."

Jack's willpower gives and his head snaps over and he looks Death straight in the face.

Six feet of leather and white bone and despite the expressionless mask it almost, almost looks like his visitor is cringing. It makes him bold. Makes him aggressive.

"I look like a fridge with two halves of a soccer ball glued to it. But you're very sweet," he coos.  And like an idiot, he bats his lashes and tosses a kiss off his pursed lips.

Death recoils like Jack slapped him, shoulders back, all off balance, and the next second there's nothing there but a cloud of smoke that streams past him in a hot, iron-scented rush.

It makes something on the table flutter, and Jack turns slowly to see the token that Death left behind.

It's glossy, and when he touches it he can feel the thickness of it. It’s a photo, a solid physical-film keepsake style photo, creases so worn that it just falls open in his hand.

He hears himself make a small wounded noise-- it seems to echo through his head, like the space is as empty as his namesake. He knows he's shaking because the paper is fluttering in his fingers, he knows he's tearing up because his good eye is as blurry as his bad one and the light is coming in bright streaks, but he doesn't feel it. He doesn't hear the heavy photostock rattling-- it's all static now in his ears and his brain.

It was folded carefully; the places where it’s been bent are worn down to white scars, but they don’t bite across the faces of the two young men. Even through the blur in his vision he recognizes them.

It's him with his arm around Vincent. They’re posed in front of mountains he doesn't recognize, and they look like shit. Vincent has faint bags under his eyes, and they’re both sporting travel-hair and rumpled clothes. They look exhausted and so, so happy.

And it’s him. It’s a Jack he finally recognizes.

And it’s not that he’s unchanged physically. Christ, in the photo he’s not much older than when he entered the SEP, but he’s already bigger than he remembers being. His shoulders are wider, his face a little leaner, jawline squarer in a way he thought was a trick of age. Should’ve known better. He saw the action star the program made out of 24.  

It’s the expression. The presence behind his eyes. That’s not the alien Jack from the missing years who spent years as a UN bootlicker, and then made a face-heel turn to invade London. That’s not the Jack who let some idiot promote him over 24. That’s not his calculated customer service smile.

That’s him. Different, but recognizably him, and he’s doing exactly what Jack right now would do if he could. He’s tired and his smirk is a little bitchy and my god, he’s a real boy. It’s fundamentally right in a way no other picture of him is.

 

Jack folds the picture carefully again and presses it to his chest. He can feel his lungs heaving, tears trickling slowly down his face. He touches his face gingerly-- yes, his eye makeup is absolutely running.

...he sure is standing here with a heaving bosom, delicately touching his face with one hand and clutching his chest with the other. His fingers are in fact trembling. His inner Victorian heroine has grabbed the wheel and she'll want a silk handkerchief and a fainting couch next. He grins at himself, wide enough to feel the scar tissue pull; he tastes saltwater and bitter waxy off-brand mascara as tears run into his mouth.

He knows it's over. He knows it didn’t work and Vincent moved on and Jack’s not going to go stalk his poor husband.

But now he knows that they had this one day-- he can almost feel the sun on them but his skin remembers an autumn chill.  And that’s infinitely more than he had this morning. He didn't get lobotomized during the SEP, he was still himself afterwards and he held Vincent again and they went to the mountains and it's--god, he’s glad he’s got this back. Even the raccoon is overwhelmed with the relief. it's like he was missing half a lung and didn't realize until it was suddenly back and he could breathe.

This photo’s not going in the conspiracy scrapbook. He wants to keep it close. Safe.

Speaking of safe-- he stirs himself from his Victorian swoon to go dig a zippered bag out of his kitchen drawers, sealing the photo up safe inside. He knows he’s being white trash and he will wear that with pride. Ziplocks were good enough for his Ma and they’re good enough for him. Once he’s sure it’s locked up airtight, he slips the bagged photo into his pillow-case, where it’ll rest between the pillow and the support of his bed.

His eyes catch on the stitchmarks, and he pauses.

It was obvious that he was seeing things. Death comes and goes in smoke, through locked doors. He’s an amnesiac with a dark past, of course he hallucinates.

Occam’s razor is starting to cut another way.

He looks back at the four little puncture holes. He could have made them, sure-- if he’d punched in with his fingers hard enough, or if he’d sleepwalked into the kitchen for a knife, but… it’d be a lot easier to make these tears with some kind of edgy clawed glove.

He could have made the scratches on his wrist with a knife, too, but the spacing and angle of them--

Death left him a photo. Death made him promises.

...Death has called him some names that he will put up with from his subconscious but not from his stalker.

That’s something to deal with tomorrow. ‘Sombra says you owe her’ is something to talk to Tash about, tomorrow. Today. Later.

As he’s scrubbing his ruined makeup off in the tiny bathroom, he catches his own eyes in the mirror, and his own features fall into place a little more quickly than they usually do. He can see what remains of the Jack in the photograph in the unfamiliar lines, a missing link that bridges now and then, softens the impact of the present.

Dried and moisturized he staggers out of the bathroom, flipping off the light, going from darkness to darkness. He drops his clothes near the dark blur of the hamper and doesn’t bother to hunt down his sleep shorts;  he sprawls naked in bed and lets the the heat of the day vent off into the cool air.

Half asleep slides a hand under the pillow without thinking, he feels the edge of the photo in its plastic bag against his thumb, and for a second he aches all over. He had something wonderful and it got lost along the way, in the empty time where he made so many decisions he doesn’t understand.

At some point there was a day in fall, in the mountains, and Vincent was in his arms and things were right. Somehow that comforts him as much as it hurts.

 

_Jack is 22 going on 23. The omniums are quiescent, memorials to a failed enterprise. There is no crisis. The world is quiet._

_It is especially quiet on wrong side of midnight in the pleasant Ohio suburb he’s dragging himself through, eyes out for a gas station, a convenience store. Anything. People say cornfields are creepy, but they’re not a patch on the Fucking Suburbs. Cookie cutter houses stretch out in every direction._

_Two cars pass-- slow, get a look at his sad limp wig and his running hose, speed up faster._

_Fuck them too._

_Another mile drags by; the tract housing peters out to slightly less well kept residences. Greek letters on one or two of the houses-- is he near Miami University? He’s more lost than he thought. But Oxford’s a college town, there at least has to be a bar or something nearby…_

_In some direction…_

_Motion catches his eye, a shadow passing in front of a curtained window. He stops, and watches, and it passes again._

_Someone’s up._

_He moves before he can talk himself out of it. He always fucks up when he second guesses; he squares himself up and strolls up the walk, kitten heels clicking on the ragged pavers, and knocks shave and a haircut on the door._

_He hears hurried footsteps, and the door swings open abruptly._

_“Hi. Can I help-- what time is it?” There’s a guy about his age, a little taller and even leaner. His eyes are dark circles, his hair pulled into three different directions._

_“I don’t know. Two-thirty. Three?”_

_“Huh.” His hand comes up to his hair and smoothes a tuft of it the wrong direction. “Oh. Hey, hi, can I help you?”_

_“Yeah!” Jack summons up his inner doll, pastes on a bright smile. “So! I had a teeny, tiny fight with boyfriend -- soon to be ex boyfriend-- and he … left me here and took off. With my phone in my wallet in his van. Aaand I need to get back to Indiana, sooo. Can I use your phone?” Winning smile._

_“Oh. Oh, yeah, please. Come in.” He holds the door open and waves Jack into a dark hall stinking of weed and cheap beer. “I’m so sorry, how long have you been walking?”_

_“I’m not sure. I waited for a while in case he came back for me, maybe an hour?”_

_Jack’s rescuer leads him to a bedroom just off the main hall. It would be tidy if it wasn’t full of computer parts, but it smells clean, lacks the distinctive fratboy reek of the rest of the house._

_There’s a mat beside the door for shoes-- Jack steps out of his heels gratefully, tucks himself daintily onto the beanbag his rescuer indicates, and accepts the phone he holds out._

_“It’s unlocked. Go ahead, do you want something, we have-- we have redbull, mostly, sorry. Or water? Ramen?.”_

_He looks a little strung out on energy drinks himself,  but his smile is sweet and genuine, and Jack catches himself melting just a little._

_He scolds himself. He’s just rebounding hard, of course next to Tucker any guy looks like a prize, they’re complete strangers to each other._

_“Water would be great. Thanks.”_

_His rescuer nods and vanishes back into the house, leaving Jack trustingly with his phone. Almost definitely not a chainsaw murderer, so Jack’s night isn’t getting any worse._

_He calls his parents first. He gets the machine-- that means his dad is actually sleeping tonight, so he stifles his disappointment and leaves a quick message saying he’ll be home late and not to worry and he’ll call if plans change._

_He steels himself, and calls Tucker._

_One ring. Two. Three.  He hasn’t even decided if he’s going to apologize and ask him to come pick him up or cuss him out._

_Four. The call disconnects abruptly, sends him to voicemail._

_That rat bastard rejected his call._

_He calls his own phone-- he’ll pick up if he realizes he has Jack’s stuff, right?_

_One ring. Two. Three--_

_And then his own voice is telling him ‘This is Jack Morrison. I can’t answer the phone right now but if you leave a message--’_

_He knows.  He knows he has Jack’s stuff because either he or one of his shitty bandmates had to reach into his purse, get his phone, and shut it off. And either he knows Jack is stranded or he’s not thinking, because he doesn’t think about anything but himself and his garbage band that Jack has been to every fucking show of that not that he could ever be bothered to see Jack perform in return that spiteful narcissistic ffff--_

_“--water?”_

_He looks up. His rescuer is holding out a bottle._

_“He knows,” Jack says dully._

_“Knows?”_

_“My boyfriend, he knows he’s got my stuff. He’s not taking my calls.”_

_The guy blinks. “What a dick.”_

_“I know, right? ...thanks.” Jack trades his phone for the water. “No, wait. I’m gonna have to call my parents back. Tell them I need a ride. Pa will be up in a few hours anyway. Is there a bus station or someplace I can have him meet me--”_

_“No. I mean-- there is, but. I’m not going to make you wait in a bus station. I’ve got a car. Let me give you a ride?”_

_“Oh, honey. That’s really sweet, but I live outside of Bloomington, that’s like-- three hours from here?”_

_“I don’t have class tomorrow, and that’s--”  He waves a hand at his computer vaguely. “I need some time away from that.”_

_“I mean. If you don’t mind. I’ll pay you back for the gas, with interest…”_

_“No-”_

_“Yes!”_

_“We can argue in the car, okay?” His rescuer offers him a chivalrous hand up, braces him as he steps back into his heels with a wince. “Wow, those don’t look comfortable.”_

_“They’re great, actually, just not for hiking.”_

_“I’ll grab a blanket, you can slip them back off in the car.”_

_His rescuer drives a bright yellow VW Beetle with a bold black racing stripe._

_“It’s cute! It’s like that jeep from the movies. Bee-balm. Robot car.”_

_“Actually, in the last century animated series and the prequel film in 2018--uh. Pretend I didn’t-- ignore that?” His rescuer rubs the back of his head._

_“...oh no, honey, are you a nerd? Are you a giant nerd who drives a robot car?” He’s punchy, he thinks he sounds cute, but he’s probably being a giant dick, he looks up to see if he’s offended his knight in dorky armor._

_The guy is biting his lip adorably, and gives him a sheepish smile that makes Jack go weak in the knees._

_“Oh, you’re really cute.”_

_His rescuer is now blushing, a healthier bronze instead of that nocturnal programmer pallor.  He opens the door for Jack with a flourish, waiting for him to strap in before he passes him the blanket and phone._

_“Here, put your address in here? If that’s okay?”_

_“Sure.”_

_As his rescuer settles into the seat, he leans over, passes his phone back._

_“Hey-- thanks. I’m probably going to pass out when we get on the road. So. Thanks. And don’t take me into the woods and kill me. I’m too pretty to be a statistic.”_

_“Yeah, you are.” His rescuer gives him a lopsided smile, and then winces at himself. “That was creepy.”_

_“Aw, no.” Jack’s hazy brain clears up just long enough to realize: “...Honey, you’re about to drive me to Indiana, I don’t even know your name. I’m Jack. Barbie, when I’m cute, but. Jack in boy clothes.”_

_“Hi, Jack.” He gets a soft smile. “I’m Vincent.”_

_Jack settles into the comfortable bucket seats of Vincent’s VW. Vincent starts the engine, idling in the drive for a second-- he fiddles with the climate controls and warm air starts to pool around Jack’s feet._

_Jack, 22 going on 23, tips his head back against the headrest, and sleeps._

 

Jack, 25 going on 56, brushes his fingertips against a faded photograph, and sleeps.   


End file.
